In the Bible it is said that it is a law for human beings to eat bread in the sweat of their brow, and in sorrow to bring forth children.
A peasant, Bondarev, who wrote an article about this, lit up for me the wisdom of that saying. (In my whole life two Russian thinkers have had a great moral influence on me, enriched my thought, and cleared up my outlook on life. These men were not Russian poets, or learned men, or preachers-they were two remarkable men who are still living, both of them peasants: Sutaev and Bondarev.)
But nous avons change tout ca, as a character in Moliere said after having blundered on medical matters and said that the liver was on the left side. Nous avons change tout ca: men need not work to feed themselves, it will all be done by machines, and women need not bear children. Science will teach us various methods and there are too many people as it is.
In the Krapivenski district1 there is a ragged peasant who wanders about. During the war2 he was employed by a commissariat officer in the purchase of grain. Having attached himself to this official, the peasant, it seems, went out of his mind with the idea that he, like the gentlefolk, need not work but would receive the maintenance due to him from his Majesty the Emperor. He now calls himself the Most-Serene-Military Prince Blokhin, Contractor for military provisions of all ranks. He says he has ‘completed all grades of the service’, and having ‘finished the military profession’ he is to receive from the Emperor ‘an open Bank, clothes, uniforms, horses, carriages, tea, peas, servants, and all supplies’.
To the question: Does he not want some work? he always proudly replies: ‘Much obliged-that will all be performed by the peasants.’
If one tells him that the peasants also may not want to work, he replies: ‘For the peasants the performance of labour presents no difficulty’ (he always prefers grandiloquent language). ‘There is now the invention of machinery for the facilitation of the peasants,’ he says. ‘For them it is not irksome.’ When one asks him what he lives for, he replies: ‘To pass the time.’
I always look at this man as into a mirror. In him I see myself and our whole class.
To finish with a rank enabling one to live ‘to pass the time’, and to receive an ‘open Bank’, while the peasants, as the invention of machinery makes work no longer irksome for them, do all the labour, is a complete formulation of the insensate creed of our circle.
1 The district in which Yasnaya Polyana is situated.-A.M.
2 The Russo-Turkish war of 1887-8.-A. M.
When we ask: What then must we do?-we do not really ask anything, but merely affirm-only not with the frankness of the Most-Serene-Military-Prince Blokhin, who has completed all the grades and has lost his reason-that we do not want to do anything.
He who comes to his senses cannot put the question, because on the one side all that he uses has been made and is made by man’s hands and on the other side, as soon as a healthy man takes up and eats something he feels a need to work with his legs, hands, and brain. To find work and to do it he needs only not to hold himself back; only he who considers it a shame to work-like a lady who asks her guests not to trouble to open the door, but to wait till she calls a servant to do so-only he can put to himself the question, what he is to do.
What is necessary is, not to invent work to do-you can’t overtake all the work needed for yourself and for others-but what is needed is to get rid of the criminal view of life, that I eat and sleep for my pleasure, and to acquire the simple and true view which the peasants grow up with and hold, that man is primarily a machine which has to be stoked with food, and that it is therefore shameful and uncomfortable and impossible to go on eating and not to work; that to eat and not to work is a most dangerous condition, resembling a conflagration. If one only has that consciousness, plenty of work will always be at hand and it will be joyous and satisfying for the needs of one’s body and soul. The case presented itself to me like this: our food divides our day into four ‘spells’, as the peasants term it: (1) till breakfast, (2) from breakfast till dinner, (3) from dinner till evening meal, (4) and the evening. Man’s natural activity is also divided into four kinds: (1) muscular activity-work of hands, feet, shoulders, and back-heavy work which makes one sweat; (2) the activity of the fingers and wrists-that of craftsmanship; (3) activity of the mind and imagination; (4) and the activity of social intercourse. And the blessings men make use of can also be divided into four classes.
First, the products of heavy labour-grain, cattle, buildings, & c.; secondly, the products of craftsmanship clothes, boots, utensils and so forth; thirdly, the products of mental activity-the sciences and arts; and fourthly, the arrangements for intercourse with people-acquaintanceships, &c. And it seemed to me that best of all would be so to vary the day’s occupations as to exercise all four human faculties and re-create all four kinds of produce we consume, in such a way that the four spells should be devoted: the first, to heavy labour; the second, to mental labour; the third, to craftsmanship; and the fourth, to intercourse with one’s fellows. It would be well if one could arrange one’s work so, but if not, the one important thing is to retain consciousness of one’s duty to work-of the duty of employing each spell usefully.
It seemed to me that only then would the false division of labour that exists in our society be abolished, and a just division established which would not infringe man’s happiness.
I, for instance, have occupied myself all my life long with mental work. I said to myself that I have so divided labour that writing, that is, mental work, was my special occupation, and the other necessary occupations I allowed (or compelled) others to do for me. That arrangement, apparently the most advantageous for mental labour, to say nothing of its injustice, was after all disadvantageous for mental labour.
All my life long I had arranged my food, sleep, and amusements with regard to those hours of specialized work, and besides that work I had done nothing.
The result was: first that I limited my circle of observation and knowledge and often lacked a subject of study, and often when setting myself the task of describing the lives of men (and the lives of men are the perpetual problem of all mental activity) I felt my ignorance and had to learn and inquire about things known to every man who is not occupied with specialized work; secondly, it happened that I sat down to write without any inner compulsion to write, and no one demanded of me writing for its own sake, that is to say for my thoughts, but only wanted my name for journalistic purposes.
I tried to squeeze what I could out of myself: sometimes nothing could be squeezed out, sometimes only something very poor, and I felt dissatisfied and dull. So that very often days and weeks passed when I ate and drank, slept and warmed myself, without doing anything, or doing only what nobody needed; that is to say, I committed an unquestionable and nasty crime of a kind hardly ever committed by a man of the labouring classes. But now after having recognized the necessity of physical work, both rough work and handicraft, something quite different happened: my time was occupied, however humbly, in a way that was certainly useful and joyous and instructive for me. And so I tore myself away from that unquestionably useful and joyous occupation to my speciality only when I felt an inner need a saw a demand directly addressed to me for my work as a writer. And just these demands conditioned the quality, and therefore the value and joyousness of my specialized work.
So it turned out that occupation with the physical work necessary for me as for every man, not only did not hinder my specialized activity but was a necessary condition of the utility, quality, and pleasurability of that activity. . .
A bird is so made that it is necessary for it to fly, walk, peck, and consider, and when it does all that it is satisfied and happy, in a word, it is then really a bird. Just so is it with man: when he walks, turns about, lifts, draws things along, works with his fingers, eyes, ears, tongue, and brain-then and only then is he satisfied and really a man.
A man conscious that it is his vocation to labour will naturally aim at such a rotation of work as is natural for the satisfaction of his internal and external needs, and he will change this order only if he feels within him an irresistible vocation for some exceptional work and if other people require that work of him.
The nature of work is such that the satisfaction of all man’s needs requires just the change to different
