"My Visit to Tolstoy": Five DiscoursesKrauskopf, Joseph
Religion
"My Visit to Tolstoy": Five Discourses
Krauskopf, Joseph
Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910
Little wonder that the government had no love for Tolstoy, and that
it suppressed publication after publication of his, and maintained a
special corps of censors and spies to watch him. Little wonder that it
prohibited demonstrations of sorrow at the announcement of his death,
and made use of the church as a cat's paw for holding him up as the
Anti-Christ, and arch-fiend, as the enemy of the Czar, Church and
people.[2]
[2] See his essay "_Church and State_."
His demands of the
people.
Plain and fearless as was his speech to the government it was yet more
so to the people. Not a wrong in society, public or private, which he
did not know, and which he did not castigate as only he knew how to
castigate. Louder and louder, as he grew older, he preached the Law of
God against the law of degenerate society. Art and science, commerce
and industry were to him as nothing in comparison with the Moral Law,
without which he saw no future for mankind.
His views respecting
marriage and society.
The sanctity of the marriage tie, the sobriety and industry of the
husband, the domesticity of the wife, were among the most constant of
his themes. He loathed the self-exhibiting society woman; in his eyes
she was no better than the street-woman. Great to him was the womanly
woman, greater the domestic wife, greatest of all the mother, and so
many more times greater the more times she was mother.[3]
[3] See his essays "_Man and Woman, Their Respective
Functions_;" and "_The Mother_," and his book "_What To Do?_"
His views respecting
labor and capital.
The sad lot of the poor and the riotous extravagances of the rich were
constantly recurrent subjects of discussion with him. "We speak of the
abolition of slavery," said he, "but we have abolished only the word,
the poor are enslaved as much as ever. We need a new emancipation,
the emancipation of the rich from the tyranny of their money, from
the thraldom of the false view of themselves and of society. With
what right do men speak of the abolition of slavery, when every time
they look into the mirror they see a slave-driver, when they live in
idleness, and fatten on the heart's blood of the down-trodden, when
they indulge their stomachs with the choicest of dainties, and wrap
their bodies in silks and broad cloths and furs, while those, whose
slavish toil provides these luxuries and comforts, have not enough food
to keep body and soul together, nor enough of raiment and shelter to
keep from freezing?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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