I've been reading Anna Karenina—I'm about halfway through it—and it's piqued my curiosity about Leo Tolstoy. So I did some quick little surface-skimming online research about him. The trajectory of his philosophical/political/moral development is interesting. Coming from the landed gentry, Tolstoy in the course of his long life that spanned most of the 19th century and on through the first decade of the 20th became more and more a foe of the Russian status quo. He was in many ways quite radical, ultimately opposing the czarist state, the military, the feudal system, even the church. He ended up embracing a mishmosh of ideas characterized as Christian anarchism. For his rejection of the established church he was excommunicated. For his anti-stateism he was embraced by many of the leading Russian anarchists of the late 19th century, and he in turn helped them in various ways including editing and publishing some of their works. However, Tolstoy was also a pacifist. He did not think the oppressed and exploited masses should rise up and fight to overturn their oppressors. He did not support revolutionary struggle, whether of anarchist or communist or even bourgeois-democratic ilk. In fact he was not for actually doing anything. Instead, he espoused an individualistic pacific hermetic existence—not that he ever managed to actually pull such off himself, not until a last-ditch flail during his final days—just the sort of irrelevant, counterproductive, clueless nostrum that had and still has no meaning, nothing to offer, for the workers and oppressed people. Turn the other cheek, live on bread and water—this sort of thing sometimes has a nearly exotic appeal for those who've lived lives of privilege, who find themselves alienated and rebellious, who know the whole lousy system stinks, but who can only contemplate retreat as their own personal response and shrink away from any mass organized revolutionary action.
There are, I think, present-day counterparts to Tolstoy
among the current crop of writers. Not necessarily alike in literary greatness,
but in attitude, this alienation, this rejection, this recognition of the
awfulness of life under late-stage capitalism—alienation, rejection,
recognition that yet result in nothing but anomie, that are not harnessed
toward any good use, that is, toward action or even support and encouragement
of action. It's not hard to find novels or plays that include social critique,
that hark to the hard truths about this harsh place and time. Sadly, most of
them fairly reek of hopelessness. They've nothing to offer. No news, for who
doesn't already know this shit stinks? And no ideas about a way forward, no
direction toward how to make positive change. I've been used to thinking of
this as the literature of cynicism. Having just read two commentaries on
Tolstoy by V.I. Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, I realize that I've
been wrong. Not all, maybe not even most, of these writers are cynics. Many of
them are politically progressive in one way or another. It's just that they're trapped
by the limits of their own perspective, constricted by the bourgeois
consciousness that prevents them from breaking through and following their own knowledge
and observation all the way toward the logical end, which is revolution. Art
for revolution. Revolutionary art. And so, variously conscious as they may be,
good-hearted, well-meaning, they and their words end up turned inward, serving
nothing but their own need for artistic expression and readers' own hunger for
good writing. Cynical, maybe not. But never rising to the heights they might.
I find Lenin's comments about Tolstoy striking among other
reasons because he has no qualms about calling him a great artist. With all
Tolstoy's political shortcomings and errors Lenin lists, he never denies him
his due or says we shouldn't read him. He just clarifies, from the perspective
of the class struggle, what Tolstoy did and didn't see, what he got right and
what he got wrong. This analysis, first in a September 1908 piece, bears the fascinating title "Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution."
Then he wrote a second piece, published in November 1910 on
the occasion of the great novelist's death. Here's an excerpt.
Tolstoy’s works express both the strength and the weakness, the might and the limitations, precisely of the peasant mass movement. His heated, passionate, and often ruthlessly sharp protest against the state and the official church that was in alliance with the police conveys the sentiments of the primitive peasant democratic masses, among whom centuries of serfdom, of official tyranny and robbery, and of church Jesuitism, deception and chicanery had piled up mountains of anger and hatred. His unbending opposition to private property in land conveys the psychology of the peasant masses during that historical period in which the old, medieval landownership, both in the form of landed estates and in the form of state “allotments” definitely became an intolerable obstacle to the further development of the country, and when this old landownership was inevitably bound to be destroyed most summarily and ruthlessly. His unremitting accusations against capitalism—accusations permeated with most profound emotion and most ardent indignation—convey all the horror felt by the patriarchal peasant at the advent of the new, invisible, incomprehensible enemy … all the calamities attending the, “epoch of primitive accumulation,” aggravated a hundredfold by the transplantation into Russian soil of the most modern methods of plunder elaborated by the all powerful Monsieur Coupon.But the vehement protestant, the passionate accuser, the great critic at the same time manifested in his works a failure to understand the causes of the crisis threatening Russia, and the means of escape from it … . His struggle against the feudal police state, against the monarchy, turned into a repudiation of politics, led to the doctrine of “non-resistance to evil,” and to complete aloofness from the revolutionary struggle of the masses in 1905–07. The fight against the official church was combined with the preaching of a new, purified religion, that is to say, of a new, refined, subtle poison for the oppressed masses. The opposition to private property in land did not lead to concentrating the struggle against the real enemy—landlordism and its political instrument of power, i.e., the monarchy—but led to dreamy, diffuse and impotent lamentations. The exposure of capitalism and of the calamities it inflicts on the masses was combined with a wholly apathetic attitude to the world-wide struggle for emancipation waged by the international socialist proletariat.
