The family believed in availing themselves of the benefits of civilization, and for that they required the income of the farm and the royalty of his books. There was quite a wrangle, for a time, between the family and its head, but it was amicably disposed of in the end, the count agreeing to their living as they chose, on the condition that they permitted him to live as he pleased. And so in his Moscow home as well as in that at Yasnaya Polyana, while the family rooms are said to be comfortably furnished, his own were poorly fitted out, and while they have servants and butlers and footmen, he attended to his own wants, fetched his own water, cobbled his own shoes, and, in summer time, labored in the field, from morn to night, alongside the commonest peasant.
Description of his working room.
Stopping suddenly in his conversation with his wife, and begging us to excuse him for leaving us, I asked him whether he knew where my bag was put, as I wanted to get to my writing material for the purpose of dropping a line to the American Minister. Mr. White had feared that, not being wanted in Russia, I might get into trouble soon after leaving the protection of our embassy in St. Petersburg, and he had enjoined upon me that I keep in constant touch with him, as well as with the American consuls, while in the interior. The count informing me that my bag had been placed into his working-room, on the ground floor of the house, I had a glimpse of the room in which some of the greatest writings of our time, of all times, first saw the light of day. It was a small room with an ordinary, bare floor somewhat the worse for wear, with a vaulted ceiling, and with very thick walls that gave it the aspect of a mediaeval cloister cell. I have since read that at one time it was a storeroom, and that from the hooks in the ceiling were formerly suspended the ham supply for the family. Besides a crude writing-desk and a few chairs, there seemed to be no other furniture in the room, and its only ornaments, as far as I can recall, were some farm implements, tools, and seed bags. The desk was littered over with books and papers, and showed the kind of disorder one would expect of a genius like Tolstoy.
Favored suppression of lawyers.
Upon my return to the tree, I found the count in conversation with my companion, who told me later that upon Tolstoy’s asking him what his occupation was, and upon his replying that he had graduated from the law-school of the University of Moscow, and that, owing to restrictive laws against Jews, he was not permitted to practice, the count had remarked that the government had done at least one good thing, it had diminished the number of lawyers.
Amazed at the amount of poverty in New York.
Resuming my seat alongside of him, he asked me whether it was true that New York expended as much as one hundred thousand dollars daily in public charity. I told him that it probably was true. He then returned to his discussion on the appalling contrast between the very rich and the very poor of the large cities in Europe and America. The rich, he said, would never be as rich as they are nor the poor as poor if the latter were scattered as farmers over the land. It is their congregating in large numbers in the cities, he said, that makes possible the extensive industries and commercial enterprises which enslave them, and which build up the great fortunes of the rich.
Belittled his own novels.
“Have you read my book What To Do?” he suddenly asked me. I was obliged to answer “No.” I have read it since, and several times, and profitably, too, but, though I had read quite a number of his books before I met him, it was exceedingly embarrassing to be questioned concerning the particular book which I had not read. Not to appear altogether ignorant of his writings, I proceeded to tell him that I had read his “War and Peace,” “Anna Karénina,” etc., etc., and started telling him how much I admired them, when, with an impatient look and gesture, he interrupted me, saying “These works are all chaff, chaff, play-toys, amusing gilded youth and idle women. It is my serious writings which I want the world to read. I have ceased publishing novels because readers do not know the meaning of them. They look for entertainment and not instruction, and even though I write only for the uplift of man, for the purification of society, they, like the hawk, seek out only the carrion. They neither recognize themselves under the fictitious name I adopt, nor do they see their share in the wrongs and vices and injustices depicted, neither do they perceive that it is for their co-operation that the novelist appeals when he pleads for the kingdom of heaven on earth.”
Spoke of his book What To Do.
Returning to his book What To Do, he said, “even if you have not read it, you have read the Prophets, and having read them, you know my teachings. The book is an appeal for pity for the submerged, for justice for the wronged, for liberation of the oppressed and persecuted, and for the application of the only remedy—a return to the simple life and labor on the soil. As our subsistence comes from the soil so can justice and right and happiness come from it alone. Help can never come from wealth, for wealth is the creator of poverty and inequality and injustice. It can not come from the government for that exists largely for the purpose of keeping up inequality and injustice. It cannot come from the church, for she fears the Czar more than she fears God. It cannot even come from the schools which tend to train a class of people who think themselves too good for manual labor.”
Saw solution of Jewish problem only in agriculture.
“Your plan to lead your people back to the soil,” he continued, “back to the occupation which your fathers followed with honor in Palestinian lands, is of some encouragement to me. It shows that the light is dawning. It is the only solution of the Jewish problem. Persecution, refusal of the right to own or to till the soil, exclusion from the artisan guilds, made traders of the Jew. And the world hates the trader. Make bread-producers of your people, and the world will honor those who give it bread to it.”
Made a request of me.
“There is little chance at present,” he continued, “for a Jewish colonization scheme in Russia. The government does not want to see the Jews rooting themselves on Russian soil, and spreads the report that they are unfit for agricultural labor, though I have been reliably informed that in the few Jewish agricultural colonies that have been tolerated on the steppes from the time of Alexander I they are as successful farmers as are the best.” And he asked me as a favor that I make a special trip to those colonies and report to him, preferably in person, the result of my observations. I was only too anxious to consent to his request.
And yet another promise he asked of me, and which I gave no less cheerfully. But of this I shall speak in my next discourse.
RESUMÉ—Discourse I: Reasons for my visit to Russia and for my calling on Tolstoy. His appearance and personality. Some of his views on Russia, its statesmen, religion, misgovernment. A pause under the Poverty Tree—his burial place.
Discourse II: Recalled food-relief for famine-stricken in Russia from Philadelphia and from Jewish congregation in California. Admired Quakers for their opposition to war. Blamed schools for many social wrongs. Severely criticised political and economical evils of our country. Ascribed them to growth of cities and to farm-desertions. His relationship with wife and family. His working-room. Against lawyers. Belittled his novels. Spoke of his book What To Do? Saw solution of Jewish problem in agriculture only.
Tolstoy suggests school for training American lads in agriculture.
At the conclusion of my last discourse I made mention of yet another request count Tolstoy made of me. It was in connection with his prediction that the Russian government would not look favorably upon my proposition to colonize Russian Jews upon unoccupied farm-lands in the interior. “If the plan cannot be entered upon in Russia,” he asked, “why can it not be made successful in the United States? What are you, Americans, doing to prevent a Jewish problem in your own country? How long before the evils that are harrowing your people in the old world may be harrowing them in the new? Your people are crowding into your large cities by the thousands and tens of thousands. You have built up Ghettoes worse than those of Europe.
There is excuse for it in Russia; there is
