Anna Karenina (Literature Classics Series). Leo Tolstoy

them to people, but I say, 'Give me seventeen rubles, and then I will give them to you.' And as the peasant sells his last sheep in the country, so here the poor student, the teacher, every poor man, deprives himself of necessaries in order to give me this money. And then I take this money to the city, and only give it to poor men when they comply with my shims, and come to town to clean my sidewalks, my lamps, my boots, and to toil in factories for my benefit. And I get as much as I can out of them, and give them as little as possible. I have erred so far that I have regarded this grasping of thousands with one hand, and this squandering of kopeks with the other, on any one who might strike my fancy, as good. It is no wonder that I was ashamed of myself." Very little of the following chapter meets with the approval of the censor. It contains comparisons of the ways of the rich - the Demidoffs and other families being mentioned by name, the bankers, merchants, and the land-owners, to which latter class the writer himself belongs - with those of the poor. "I go to help the poor," he says. "Who is poorer than I? No one. … I am a weak, good-for-nothing parasite, who can exist only under special conditions; who can exist only when thousands of people toil for the support of this life, which is useful to no one. … I know how to do nothing but eat, and talk, and listen, and write, and sleep. … The only wonder is that I should ever have had so stupid a thought as helping people who are good for something," is his conclusion. "I have never done anything in my life. I do nothing, and never shall do anything except cut off coupons, and yet I firmly believe that money represents labor. This is amazing! Talk of lunatics after that!" he exclaims at the conclusion of an earnest argument that money is only a new form of slavery. The root of all slavery is the use of the labor of others; and having once perceived the "immorality" of his position, Count Tolstoi resolved to use no more of his money to compel slavery, to do everything for himself, or to do without it. "This simple and inevitable deduction enters into all the details of my life," he says. "It alters it completely, at once frees me from those moral sufferings which I experienced at the sight of the sufferings and vice of men, and instantly annihilates all those causes of my inability to help the poor which I discovered while seeking the reason of my failure." These causes are, the herding together of the poor in towns, the isolation of the rich from the poor, and the shame consequent on the consciousness of being wrongfully in possession of the money with which he tried to assist the poor; money, being in itself an evil thing, cannot be used as an instrument of good. The sum of the matter is contained in the words of John the Baptist: "Let him that hath two garments give to him that hath none, and let him that hath food do likewise." As Tolstoi puts it, it means "to give away everything superfluous, and never more take what is superfluous from men. … For him who is sincerely pained by the sufferings of those about him, there is the easiest, simplest, and most evident remedy, the only possible one for the alleviation of the evil which environs us, and for conferring on us a consciousness of the legitimacy of our life, the same which John the Baptist gave and which Christ confirmed, - to have but one garment and no money. Having no money signifies making no use of the labors of others, and therefore doing with our own hands all that it is possible for us to do."

      The next thing to which the censor takes exception is the description of a ball in fashionable society (in which Tolstoi expresses himself in the plainest language, with regard to the dresses and conduct of both men and women), which is introduced as a companion picture to a sketch of the factory girls who work in the vicinity of his Moscow house.

      Tolstoi's argument on behalf of wearing one shirt a week, instead of paying a laundress to provide him with two clean ones each day, and of making his own cigarettes, is, that the money thus saved can be given to the laundress for less work, or to some superannuated working people. To this he suggests the retort, that "if one goes in dirty linen, and does not smoke, but gives the money to the poor, the latter will be deprived of the money all the same, and an individual drop in the sea will do not good." It is a shame to reply to such a commonplace objection, he says, yet he does make a reply, to the effect that he would not eat savory cutlets made from a prisoner, among cannibals, even if his refusal did the prisoner no good; but the censor disapproved of this, possibly the author himself thought better of it, for it is replaced in his collected works with an Indian fable about dipping the sea dry with a bucket, to find a lost pearl, which the spirit of the sea restored in affright on the seventh day. In a brief section he sketches life in the country, and shows the selfish proprietors during their short summer residence, and the hardships of the peasants. This is followed by a lengthy consideration of the merits of science and art. His chief objection to these latter lies in the fact that they are the outcome of the division of labor, and cannot exist on any other conditions than those of rendering many people slaves, for the production of the necessaries of life for those engaged in them. "Science has now become a distributor of premiums on idleness. … With frightful struggles and conflicts men have freed themselves from many delusions. And now a new and still worse delusion has sprung up in their path, - the delusion of science. … The theory of evolution, to speak in ordinary language, merely asserts that by accident, in an endlessly long space of time, out of anything you please any other thing you please may issue." He denies that art and science have given a great deal to mankind, as is usually affirmed. Hey have not devoted themselves to the interests of the people, and those who exercise them simply live on the necks of the laboring classes. "We have become so accustomed," he says, "to our weakly and tenderly cared for representatives of mental labor that it seems barbarous to us that a learned man or an artist should till the soil or cart manure. It seems to us that all his wisdom will be ruined and shaken out of him on the cart, and that the grand artistic conceptions which he bears about in his bosom will get soiled in the manure." He thinks that art and science should not be exempted from serving themselves and others, simply because they are such very beautiful things.

      Tolstoi admits that telegraph, telephone, spectroscope, chloroform, and many other inventions and discoveries are wonderful, but he maintains that the condition of the majority - of the working people that is - has been rendered worse by them, since the railways, factories, and so on have only served to make poor men the slaves of capitalists. According to his views, the province of science is to teach the poor man what axe is the best to cut with, what is the swiftest saw, the best way to mix bread and the proper flour to use, how to set and bake it, and how to build an oven, also the right sort of food and the best utensils. He complains that instead of doing this, science has enumerated two million beetles. He frequently returns to this complaint. Not a single plant has been added to the list of foods since the days of ancient Egypt, when wheat and lentil were already known, except the potato, which was not the contribution of science. He goes into this question with a good deal of detail, pointing the moral at doctors, artists, teachers, musicians, and so forth, in turn. The poet and author should for example, throw aside their poems and romances, and write songs, histories, and tales which the people can understand; and Tolstoi considers the so-called division of labor, which has formed in our days the indispensable condition of activity on the part of artists and scientists, to be the chief reason for the slow progress of mankind. Science, in the true meaning of the term, he says, has existed as long as man himself has existed, and consists in the knowledge of those things which it most imports men to know. Such was the science of Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Mahomet, and others, - a science which is within the comprehension of every one. This has degenerated, and art also, which has descended from its true sphere of activity in the church; so that those who exercise chorographic, culinary, cosmetic, and wig-making arts are now as much entitled to the name of artists as poets, painters, and musicians.

      Tolstoi declares that if he in any way differs from the average man, on this question of the misapplication of art and science, it is because he, more than the average man, has served and forwarded this false conception of science which is held by the world, has received more applause from the people who belong to the reigning scientific circle, and has therefore sinned more than others and wandered further from the true path. For this reason, he thinks that the solution of the question which he has found for himself will fit the case of all sincere people, who have put the same question to themselves, namely, "What is to be done?" First of all, he has resolved not to lie, either to others or to himself, not to fear the truth, no matter whither it may lead him; since he firmly believes that in whatever position truth and conscience may land him, however terrible it may be, it cannot be worse than one that is founded on a lie. He has been rewarded for his boldness in doing this; all the incoherent, complicated, senseless phenomena of life have grown clear to him, and his own