On reaching that practical deduction I was surprised at the ease and simplicity with which all these questions which had seemed to me so difficult and complex solved themselves.
In reply to the question: What must I do? I saw that the most indubitable answer was: First, do all the things I myself most need-attend to my own room, heat my own stove, fetch my water, attend to my clothes, and do all I can for myself I thought this would seem strange to the servants, but it turned out that the strangeness only lasted for a week and afterwards it would have seemed strange had I resumed my former habits.
To the question whether this physical work had to be organized, and whether one should arrange a village community on the land-it turned out that all that was unnecessary, and that work-if its aim is to satisfy one’s needs, rather than to make idleness possible and utilize other people’s toil as is the case with people who are making money-draws one naturally from the town to the country, where such labour is most productive and most joyful.
It was unnecessary to arrange any community, because a man who works himself naturally joins up with the existing community of working people.
To the question: Would not this work absorb all my time and prevent my doing the mental work I love, to which I am accustomed, and which I sometimes consider useful? I received a most unexpected reply. The energy of my mental work increased-and increased in proportion to my bodily exertion and to my emancipation from all superfluity.
It turned out that after devoting eight hours to physical toil (the half of the day I had formerly passed in arduous efforts to avoid dullness) I still had eight hours left, of which I only needed five for mental work.
It turned out that if I-a very prolific writer who for forty years have done nothing but write, and have written some 5,000 pages,-if I had worked all those forty years at a peasant’s usual work, then, not reckoning winter evenings and workless days, if I had read and studied for five hours every day and had written only on holidays two pages a
day (and I have sometimes written as much as sixteen pages a day) I should have produced those 5,000 pages in fourteen years.1
I came upon a wonderful fact-a very simple arithmetical calculation a seven-year-old boy could have made, but which I had never made before. There are twenty-four hours in the day; we sleep eight, so sixteen remain. If a brainworker devotes five hours a day to his work he will get through an immense amount. What becomes of the remaining eleven hours?
It turned out that physical labour, far from rendering mental work impossible, improved and aided it.
To the question whether this physical work would not deprive me of many harmless pleasures natural to man, such as enjoyment of the arts, acquisition of knowledge, intercourse with people, and the happiness of life in general, the answer is that the opposite turned out to be true: the more intensive the labour and the nearer it approached to rough work on the land, the more enjoyment and information I obtained and the closer and more amiable was the intercourse I had with men, and the more happiness life brought me.
To the question (so often heard by me from people who are not quite sincere)-what result could come from such an insignificant drop in the ocean as my own physical work in the ocean of labour I consumed, again a very surprising and unexpected reply was obtained.
It turned out that I only needed to make physical labour the customary condition of my life, for most of the bad expensive habits and requirements that had accompanied a state of physical idleness to drop away of themselves without the least effort on my part. Not to speak of the habit of turning night into day and vice versa, and the kind of bedding, clothes, and conventional cleanliness, which are simply impossible and irksome when one is engaged on physical labour, the quality of food I wanted changed completely.
Instead of the sweet, rich, delicate, refined, and spicy foods that formerly attracted me, the simplest food: cabbage-soup, buckwheat porridge, black bread, and tea, now seemed pleasantest.
So that, not to mention the simple example of the plain peasants with whom I came in touch, who satisfied themselves with little, my needs themselves imperceptibly changed in consequence of my life of labour, so that in proportion as I accustomed myself to and assimilated habits of work, my drop of physical labour became more noticeable; and in proportion as my own work became more productive my demands on the labour of others became less and less and my life naturally, without effort or deprivation approximated to a simplicity of which I could not have dreamed had I not fulfilled the law of labour. It turned out that my most expensive demands on life, the demands of vanity and for distraction from ennui, were directly due to an idle life.
1 To get the sum right Tolstoy should, I think, have allowed himself 4 pages a day instead of 2. Taking 90 Sundays and Saints’ days in the peasants’ year, we get 90 days x 4 pages x 14 years = 5,040, or about what Tolstoy says he had actually written.-A.M.
With physical labour there was no room for vanity and no need for diversions, as my time was pleasantly occupied, and after becoming fatigued a simple rest at tea over a book, or in conversation with those near to me, was incomparably more agreeable than a theatre, cards a concert or grand society-all of them things that cost a great deal.
As to whether this unaccustomed labour would not injure the health necessary to enable me to be of use to men, it turned out that (despite the positive assertions of leading physicians that hard physical exertion, especially at my age, might injure my health, and that Swedish gymnastics, massage, and so forth-arrangements to replace the natural conditions of man’s life-would be preferable)-the harder I worked the stronger, fitter, happier, and kindler did I feel.
So that it appeared. indubitable that just as all those cunning devices: newspapers, theatres, concerts, visits, balls, cards, periodicals, and novels, are nothing but means of maintaining man’s mental life without the natural condition of labour for others, so also are all the ingenious hygienic and medical devices for the preparation of food, drink, housing, ventilation, heating, clothing, medicines, mineral waters, massage, gymnastics, electrical and other cures-it turned out that all these cunning devices are nothing but means of supporting man’s physical life when cut off from its natural conditions of labour-that it all was like an arrangement by means of chemical apparatus in an hermetically closed chamber, to evaporate water and provide plants with the kind of air best suited to their breathing-when it is only necessary to open the window: only necessary to do what is natural not only for man but for animals, namely, to discharge and expend by muscular labour the supply of energy produced by swallowing food.
The profound complexities of medicine and hygiene for people of our class are such as a mechanician might devise in order, when he has heated a boiler and screwed down all the valves, to prevent the boiler from bursting.
And when I clearly understood all this, it seemed to me ludicrous. By a long series of doubts, searchings, and reflection, I have reached the extraordinary truth that man has eyes in order to see with them, ears in order to hear with them, legs in order to walk with them, and hands and a back to work with, and that if he does not use them for their natural purpose it will be the worse for him.
I came to the conclusion that with us privileged people the same thing happens as occurred with the stallions of an acquaintance of mine.
His steward, who did not care for horses and did not understand them, having received his master’s orders to take the best stallions to the horse-market, chose them out of the herd and put them in the stalls; he fed them on oats and watered them, but wishing to be careful with such expensive horses, he did not allow anyone to ride them or drive them or even exercise them. The horses all went wrong in the legs and became worthless.
The same has happened with us, only with this difference, that it is impossible in any way to cheat the horses, and in order that they should not get out they had to be kept tied up, whereas we are kept in a similarly unnatural and ruinous condition by the temptations which enmesh us and bind us as with chains. We have arranged for ourselves a life contrary both to man’s moral and physical nature, and we direct all the strength of our minds to persuading men that this is just what life should be.
All that we call ‘culture’, our sciences and arts and the improvements of life’s comforts, are attempts to cheat man’s moral and natural demands; all that we call hygiene and medicine is an attempt to cheat the natural physical demands of human nature. But these deceptions have their limits and we have nearly reached them.
If such is man’s true life it is better not to live at all, says the prevalent most fashionable philosophy of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. If such is life it is better not to live, say an
