Three articles from Lenin on the great Russian writer and personality: Tolstoi, Mirror of the Russian Revolution, On the Death of L. Tolstoi, and Tolstoi and the Modern Labor Movement

‘Lenin on Tolstoi’ from International Revolution. No. 6. December, 1934.

Three Articles in a Classical Literary Analysis

Tolstoi, Mirror of the Russian Revolution

The coupling of the name of the great artist with the revolution which he clearly failed to understand, from which he so clearly kept aloof, may at first seem strange and artificial. Is one to call a mirror that which evidently gives a wrong reflection of things? But our revolution is a very complex phenomenon: among the mass of those who directly participated in effecting it, there are many social elements who, also, clearly failed to understand its real historical tasks which were put before us by the course of events. And if we are dealing with a really great artist, then at least some of the more essential phases of the revolution had to be reflected in his works.

The Russian legal press, replete with articles, letters and notes on the 80th anniversary of Tolstoi, is very little interested in an analysis of his work from the point of view of the nature of the Russian revolution and its moving forces. This entire press is filled to distraction with hypocrisy. hypocrisy of two sorts: official and liberal. The first is the crude hypocrisy of venal scribblers who yesterday had their orders to persecute Tolstoi and today—to find patriotism in him and try to maintain a semblance of good manners for the sake of Europe. That this sort of scribbler is paid for his stuff is well known; and he fools no one. Liberal hypocrisy is considerably more subtle and, therefore, much more harmful and dangerous. If one were to believe the Cadet balalaika players of the “Retch”—their sympathy to Tolstoi is of the fullest and the warmest. Actually, however, the studied declamations and pompous phrases about the “great God-seeker” are completely false because the Russian liberal neither believes in Tolstoi’s God nor sympathizes with Tolstoi’s criticism of the existing order. He edges up to the popular name in order to add a little to his own political capital, to assume the role of a leader of the all-national opposition. With thundering and crackling phrases he tries to drown the necessity of a clear and direct answer to the question: what is the cause of the clamorous contradictions in “Tolstoianism,” what failings and weaknesses of our revolution do they express?

The contradictions in the works, views, doctrines and school of Tolstoi are really clamorous. On the one hand an artist of genius who has given not only incomparable pictures of Russian life, but also great works in a world’s literature. On the other—a landlord, playing a fool in Christ. On the one hand an extraordinarily powerful, direct and sincere protest against social lies and falseness; on the other—a “Tolstoian,” i.e., a wornout hysterical mud-wallower called the Russian intellectual who, publicly beating his breast, wails: “I am bad, I am rotten, but I am engaged in moral self-perfection; I no longer eat meat and live only on rice cutlets.” On the one hand, relentless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of governmental violence, the comedy of the courts and government administration, the uncovering of the full depth of contradiction between the growth of wealth and the achievements of civilization, and the growth of poverty, barbarism and suffering among the masses of workers; on the other hand—weakminded preachings of “non-resistance to evil” by force. On the one hand, the most sober realism, tearing down any and all masks; on the other—advocacy of one of the most odious things in the world, namely: religion—the attempt to replace the official clergy with a clergy of honest conviction, i.e., to cultivate the subtlest and consequently the basest kind of sky-pilotry. Verily:

You are as squalid as you are opulent,
You are as powerful as you are impotent,
—Mother Russia!

It is self evident that with such contradictions it was absolutely impossible for Tolstoi to understand either the labor movement and its role in the struggle for socialism, or the Russian revolution. But the contradictions in the views and doctrines of Tolstoi are not accidental—they are an expression of those contradictory conditions in which Russian life found itself in the last third of the 19th century. The patriarchal village, only yesterday freed from serfdom, was literally handed over to capital and fiscal agencies for pillage and draining. The old foundations of the peasant economy and peasant life, foundations which had really existed for ages, went crashing with extreme rapidity. And the contradictions in Tolstoi’s. views should be taken not so much from the point of view of the modern labor movement and modern socialism (such an evaluation is, of course, necessary, but it is inadequate), as from the point of view of that resentment against the advancing wave of capitalism, ruin and land poverty of the masses which had to come from the patriarchal Russian village. As a prophet, discovering new recipes for the salvation of humanity, Tolstoi is ludicrous—and that is why the foreign and Russian “Tolstoians” who wanted to turn into a dogma the very weakest side of his doctrines, are particularly pitiful. Tolstoi is great as the one who expressed the ideas and frame of mind of the millions of the Russian peasantry at the time of the appearance of the bourgeois revolution in Russia. Tolstoi is original because his cumulative viewpoints, harmful as a whole, express precisely the peculiarities of our revolution as a peasant-bourgeois revolution. From this point of view, the contradictions in Tolstoi’s views are really the mirror of those contradictory conditions in which the historical activity of the peasantry in our revolution found itself. On the one hand: ages of feudalism and decades of accelerated ruin during the reform period accumulated mountains of hatred, bitterness and desperate decision. The tendency to sweep to its very foundations the state church, the landlords and the landlords’ government, to destroy all the old forms and regulations of landownership, clear the land, to erect, in place of the police-class-government, a commonwealth of free and equal petty farmers,—this tendency is, like a red thread, traced through every historical step of the peasants in our revolution, and it is beyond all doubt that the ideological content of Tolstoi’s writings corresponds more closely to this peasant tendency than to abstract “Christian anarchism” as his “system” of views is sometimes evaluated.

On the other hand, the peasantry, tending towards new forms of commonweal, regarded very unconsciously, patriarchally, religiously, the question of what this commonweal should be like, with what struggle the freedom is to be won for themselves, what leaders they can find for such a struggle, what is the attitude of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois-intelligentsia towards the interests of the peasantry, why the forcible overthrow of the tsarist power is necessary in order to do away with the landlord proprietorship of land. All the peasant’s past life had taught him to hate the gentleman and the official, but had not taught him and could not teach him where to look for an answer to all these questions. During our revolution only a minority of the peasantry really fought, even organizing itself somewhat for this purpose; and only a very small number rose in arms to wipe out its enemies, destroy the tsarist servants and defenders of the landlords. The greater part of the peasantry wept and prayed, soliloquized and dreamt, wrote petitions and sent “interceders”—altogether in the spirit of L. Tolstoi. And, as always happens in such cases, the Tolstoian abstention from politics, the Tolstoian renunciation of politics, the absence of interest and understanding of it, resulted in the fact that only a minority followed the conscious and revolutionary proletariat, while the majority fell a victim to unprincipled, venal, bourgeois intellectuals, who, under the title of Cadets, ran into gatherings of workers, to the waiting room of Stolypin, begged, bargained, pacified, promised to pacify,—until they were driven out at the points of soldiers’ boots. Tolstoian ideas are a mirror of the weakness, the failings of our peasant revolt, a reflection of the softness of the patriarchal village and the homespun cowardice of the “mujik-husbandman.”

Take the soldiers’ revolt of 1905-1906. The social composition of these fighters of our revolution was intermediate between the peasantry and the proletariat. The latter is in a minority, hence, the movement among the troops does not show even an approximation of that all-Russian solidarity, Party consciousness, shown by the proletariat which became social democratic almost at the wave of a hand. On the other hand, there is nothing more erroneous than the opinion that the reason for the failure of the soldiers’ revolts was the lack of leaders from among the officers. On the contrary, the gigantic progress of the revolution since the “Will of the People” days, was the result of just the fact that the ones who took up arms against the officials were those very “grey cattle,” whose independence threw such a scare into liberal landlords and liberal officers. The soldier was fully sympathetic to the peasants’ cause; his eyes burned at the mere mention of land. Many times, control of the troops fell into the hands of the mass of soldiers, but there was almost no determined utilization of this power; the soldiers vacillated; in a few hours, after killing one or another of the most hated officers, they let the others out, entered into parleys with the official powers—and then stood up before the firing squad, lay down to get lashings, took up the yoke again,—altogether in the spirit of L. Tolstoi.

Tolstoi showed the accumulated hatred, the matured tendency to a better life, the desire to get rid of the past—and the immaturity of dreaminess, lack of political training, revolutionary softness. The historico-economic conditions explain also the necessity of the rise of a revolutionary struggle of the masses and the lack of their preparedness for the struggle, the Tolstoian nonresistance to evil, which were the most serious reasons for the defeat of the first revolutionary campaign.

It is said that defeated armies study well. Of course, the comparison of the revolutionary classes with armies, is true only in a very limited sense. The development of capitalism changes and sharpens hourly the conditions which urged the millions of peasants, consolidated in their hatred of the landlord feudalists and their government, towards a revolutionary-democratic struggle. Among the peasantry itself the growth of exchange, the dominance of the market and the power of money kept crowding out more and more; patriarchal antiquity and patriarchal philosophic ideology. One achievement, however, of the first years of the revolution and the first defeats of the mass revolutionary struggle is beyond doubt: this is the mortal blow given to the previous looseness and limpness of the masses. Lines of demarcation became more sharply defined. Classes and parties began to delimit themselves. Under the hammer of the Stolypin lessons, with an unbending, sustained agitation of the revolutionary social-democrats, not only the socialist proletariat, but also the democratic masses of the peasantry will inevitably put forward more and more hardened fighters, ever less capable of falling victim to our historical sin of Tolstoism!

V.I. LENIN, Collected Works, Vol. XII, p. 330—334, Russian Edition

On the Death of L. Tolstoi

L. Tolstoi is dead. His world significance as an artist, his world fame as a thinker and preacher, both reflect, each in its own way, the world significance of the Russian revolution.

L. Tolstoi came forward as a great artist while serfdom still prevailed. In a number of books of great genius, which he wrote during more than half a century of literary activity, he depicted principally the old pre-revolutionary Russia, which remained in semi-serfdom even after 1861, the Russia of the village, the Russia of landlord and peasant. Painting this section of the historical life of Russia, L. Tolstoi had the genius to pose so many great questions in his works, to rise to such heights of artistic power, that his books occupy a leading position in the world’s fine literature. The period of preparation for the revolution in one of the countries oppressed by feudalism, was shown, thanks to the light thrown on it by Tolstoi’s genius, as a step forward in the artistic evolution of mankind as a whole.

Tolstoi, the artist, is known to an insignificant minority even in Russia. In order to make his great work really available to all, it is necessary to struggle and struggle against the social system which has condemned millions and tens of millions to darkness, oppression, drudgery and poverty; a social revolution is necessary.

And Tolstoi not only produced artistic books which will always be valued and read by the masses, when they will create for themselves human conditions of life, overthrowing the yoke of landlords and capitalists—he has also shown with remarkable power, the frame of mind of the broad masses oppressed by the modern order, painted their situation and expressed their elemental feelings of protest and indignation. Belonging mainly to the period of 1861-1904, Tolstoi, as artist, thinker and preacher, has embodied in his books, with amazing fidelity, the features of the historical peculiarity of the entire first Russian revolution, its strength and its weakness.

One of the main distinguishing features of our revolution consists of its having been a peasant-bourgeois revolution at a period of very great development of capitalism all over the world, and a comparatively high one in Russia. It was a bourgeois revolution because its direct task was the overthrow of tsarist autocracy, the tsarist monarchy, and the abolition of landlord proprietorship of land, and not the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The peasantry particularly, was not conscious of this last problem, was not conscious of its difference from the more immediate and direct problems of the struggle. And it was a peasant-bourgeois revolution because objective conditions put into first place the problem of altering the basic conditions of peasant life, of breaking up the old feudal system of land proprietorship, of “clearing the land” for capitalism; objective conditions forced the masses of the peasantry on to the arena of more or less independent historical activity.

In Tolstoi’s works, both the strength and weakness, the power and limitations, of exactly this mass peasant movement was expressed. His hot, passionate, often relentlessly-sharp protest against the state and official-police church conveys the frame of mind of primitive peasant democracy in which ages of serfdom, arbitrariness of officials and robbery, church Jesuitism, deceit and swindle had amassed mountains of bitterness and hatred. His unwavering denial of private ownership of land, conveys the psychology of the peasant masses at the historical moment when the old feudal system of land proprietorship, as well as the landlord and government “allotted” lands, became a finally intolerable hindrance to the further development of the country, and when this old system of land ownership was inevitably due for sharp, relentless abolition. His ceaseless indictment of capitalism, full of the deepest feeling and the hottest indignation, conveys the full horror of the patriarchal peasant against whom a new, incomprehensible, invisible enemy began to move, coming from the city somewhere, or from beyond the border, destroying all “foundations” of village life, carrying with him unheard of ruin, poverty, death from starvation, savagery, prostitution, syphilis —all the afflictions of the era of “primitive accumulation” sharpened a hundred fold by the transposition to Russian soil of the latest methods of robbery worked out by Mr. Coupon.

The hot protester, passionate accuser and great critic revealed in his works, however, at the same time, such a lack of understanding of the causes of the crisis which was moving on Russia, and the means of overcoming it, as was natural to only a naive peasant, not to a writer of European education. The struggle against the feudal and police government, against the monarchy, turned in him to a denial of politics, led to the preachment of “non-resistance to evil,” led to a total estrangement from the revolutionary struggle of the masses of 1905-1907. The struggle against the official church coincided with the advocacy of a new, purified religion, i.e., a new, purified, refined poison for the oppressed masses. The denial of private ownership of land, led not to a concentration of the entire struggle against the real enemy, against landlord proprietorship and its political tool of power, i.e., the monarchy, but to dreamy, vague, powerless sighs. The indictment of capitalism and the afflictions it brought to the masses, coincided with a totally apathetic attitude to that world-wide struggle for emancipation which is led by the international socialist proletariat.

The contradictions in Tolstoi’s views—are not contradictions of only his personal thoughts, but a reflection of those highly complicated, contradictory conditions, which determined the psychology of different classes and different sections of Russian society in the post-reform but pre-revolutionary era.

Consequently a correct evaluation of Tolstoi is only possible from the point of view of that class which, with its political role and its struggle at the time of the first denouement of these contradictions during the revolution, proved itself destined to be the leader in the struggle for the freedom of the people and the emancipation of the masses from exploitation—proved its supreme devotion to the cause of democracy and its ability to struggle against the limitations and inconsistencies of bourgeois (including peasant) democracy,—is possible only from the point of view of the social-democrat proletariat.

Look at the estimate of Tolstoi in the government newspapers. They shed crocodile tears, declaring their respect for “the great writer,” at the same time defending the “most holy” synod. And the most holy fathers have just completed a particularly odious abomination by sending some priests to the dying man in order to fool the people and be able to say that Tolstoi “repented.” The most holy synod had excommunicated Tolstoi. So much the better. This exploit will be remembered when the people settle accounts with the officials wearing the cloth, with the gendarmerie of Christ, with the dark inquisition that supported pogroms on Jews and other exploits of the Tsar’s black hundreds.

Look at the estimate of Tolstoi in the liberal newspapers. They get rid of the matter with empty, officially-liberal, trite, professorial phrases about the “voice of civilized mankind,” about “the unanimous response of the world,” about “ideas of truth, goodness,” etc. for which Tolstoi lashed—and lashed justly—bourgeois science. They cannot say frankly and clearly what they think of Tolstoi’s views on the state, on the church, on private ownership of land, on capitalism—not because the censorship is in their way; on the contrary, the censorship helps them get out of a difficulty!—but because every principle of Tolstoi’s criticism is a slap in the face of bourgeois liberalism;—because the very fact of Tolstoi’s fearless, open, relentlessly sharp posing of the sorest, the most accursed questions of our time is a slap in the face of the trite phrases, the hackneyed makeshifts, the evasive, “civilized” lies of our liberal (and liberal-narodnik) publicism. The liberals stand like a mountain for Tolstoi, like a mountain against the synod, and at the same time they are for…the vekhovtsy, with whom one “may argue,” but with whom it is “necessary” to make peace in one party, “necessary” to work with in literature and politics. And the vekhovtsy are the creatures of Antonius Volynski.

The liberals emphasize that Tolstoi was—”the great conscience.” Is not this an empty phrase repeated in a thousand variations by the Novoye Vremya and, all such like? Is not this an evasion of the concrete questions of democracy and socialism propounded by Tolstoi? Does this not put foremost that which expresses Tolstoi’s prejudice rather than his reason, that in him, which belongs to the past rather than to the future, to his negation of politics and advocacy of moral perfection rather than his stormy protest against class domination?

Tolstoi is dead, and pre-revolutionary Russia, whose weakness and impotence were expressed in the philosophy and depicted in the works of the genius, has receded to the past. In the heritage, however, there is that which has not receded to: the past, which belongs to the future. This heritage is taken up and worked over by the Russian proletariat. It will explain to the toiling and exploited masses the meaning of Tolstoi’s criticism of the state, the church, private ownership of land—not for the purpose of having the masses engage in self perfection and lamentations about a godly life, but for the purpose that they may rise to deliver a fresh blow to the tsarist monarchy and landlord landownership which only suffered a slight breach in 1905 and which must be destroyed. It will explain to the masses Tolstoi’s criticism of capitalism—not so that the masses will confine themselves to anathemas addressed to capital and the power of money, but that they may learn to depend at every step of their life and their struggle upon the technical and social achievements of capitalism, learn to consolidate into a single army of millions of socialist fighters who will overthrow capitalism and create a new society where there will be no poverty for the people, no exploitation of man by man.

V.I. LENIN, Collected Works, vol. XIV, pp. 400—403, Russian edition.

Tolstoi and the Modern Labor Movement

The Russian workers in almost all large cities of Russia have already responded to the death of L. Tolstoi and have expressed, in one way or another, their attitude to the writer who has produced a number of the most remarkable artistic works which put him in the ranks of the greatest writers of the world—to the thinker who, with tremendous power, sureness and sincerity raised a whole host of questions relating to the fundamental features of the modern political and social structure. On the whole this attitude is expressed in the telegram sent by the worker deputies to the Third Duma and published in the newspapers.

L. Tolstoi began his literary activity while serfdom still prevailed but at a time when it was quite evidently in its last days. Tolstoi’s principal activity falls to that period of Russian history which came between two turning points—that of 1861 and that of 1905. During this period traces of serfdom, direct experiences of it, permeated all the economic (particularly village) and all the political life of the country. And at the same time it was this very period which saw the increased growth of capitalism below and its propagation from above.

In what was the survival of serfdom evidenced? Mostly and most clearly in the fact that in Russia, a country primarily agricultural, farming was, during this period, in the hands of a ruined, impoverished peasantry which conducted an antiquated primitive husbandry on old serf allotments curtailed in favor of the landlords in 1861. While on the other hand, the land was owned by landlords who, in central Russia, worked the land by peasant labor, with the peasant’s wooden plough, the peasant’s horse, in payment for “strips of land,” meadow, water-rights, etc. In essence, this is the old serf system of economy. The political system of Russia during this period was permeated throughout with serfdom. This is seen in the governmental system up to the first beginnings of change in 1905, in the predominating influence of landlord-nobles in state affairs, and by the great power of officials who were also—particularly in the higher ranks—from among the landed nobility.

This old patriarchal Russia began, after 1861, to crumble rapidly under the influence of world capitalism. The peasantry starved, died out, was ruined as never before, and ran to the cities, abandoning the land. Railroad, factory and plant building were intensified due to the “cheap labor” of ruined peasants. Large finance capital and large trade and industry developed in Russia.

This rapid, hard, sharp breaking up of the old “foundations” of old Russia was reflected in the works of Tolstoi, the artist; in the views of Tolstoi, the thinker.

Tolstoi knew well the Russia of the village, the life of landlord and peasant. In his artistic novels he gave such pictures of this life as belong to the best works in world literature. The sharp crumbling of all “old foundations” of the Russian village sharpened his attention, deepened his interest in what was taking place about him, brought about a crisis in his entire philosophy. By birth and education Tolstoi belonged to the highest circles of landed proprietors in Russia,—he broke with all the customary views of these circles and, in his later works, attacked with passionate criticism all modern church, social and economic usages based on the enslavement of the masses, on their poverty, on the ruin of peasants and petty husbandmen generally, on violence and hypocrisy, which permeates all modern life from top to bottom.

Tolstoi’s criticism is not new. He has said nothing new, nothing which has not long ago been said in both European and Russian literature by those who were on the side of the toilers. But the peculiarity of Tolstoi’s criticism and its historical significance consist in that he expressed with a power, of which only genius is capable, the fracture in the views of the widest masses of the people of Russia of the period mentioned, and of village, peasant Russia particularly. Tolstoi’s criticism of modern customs differs from the criticism of these customs by the representatives of the modern labor movement in just the fact that Tolstoi adopted the point of view of the patriarchal, naive peasant; that Tolstoi transfers the latter’s psychology into his criticism, his doctrine. The reason Tolstoi’s criticism is charged with such feeling, passion, conviction, freshness, sincerity, fearlessness in the attempt “to get at the roots,” find the real reason for the state of the masses, is that this criticism really expresses the crisis in the views of millions of peasants who had only been emancipated from serfdom to find that this new freedom means only new horrors of ruin, starvation, a homeless life among city “sharps,” etc. Tolstoi reflects their mood so accurately, that he himself brings into his doctrine their naivete, their estrangement from politics, their mysticism, desire to escape from the world, “non-resistance to evil,” impotent anathemas towards capitalism and the “power of money.” The protest of millions of peasants and their despair—that is what was fused into Tolstoi’s doctrine.

The representatives of the modern labor movement find that they have much to protest against but nothing to despair of. Despair is native to those classes that perish, but the class of hired workers is growing, develops, and is strengthened in every capitalist society including also that of Russia. Despair is native to those who do not understand the reasons for evil, see no way out, are incapable of struggling. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to such classes.

V.I. LENIN, Collected Works, Vol. XIV, pp. 404—407, Russian edition

Literature of the World Revolution/International Literature was the journal of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1927, that began publishing in the aftermath of 1931’s international conference of revolutionary writers held in Kharkov, Ukraine. Produced in Moscow in Russian, German, English, and French, the name changed to International Literature in 1932. In 1935 and the Popular Front, the Writers for the Defense of Culture became the sponsoring organization. It published until 1945 and hosted the most important Communist writers and critics of the time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/international-literature/1934-n06-last-IL.pdf