TOLSTOY’S LIFE AND WORK

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 16 June 1932, Page 4

TOLSTOY’S LIFE AND WORK

A GREAT RUSSIAN LECTURE BY PROFESSOR SINCLAIRE The life and work of Tolstoy, the great Russian author, was the subject of a lecture given to the Christchurch Workers’ Educational Association by Professor E. Sinclairo (reports the “Times”). “Tolstoy’s long life of eighty-two years, from 1928 to 1910,” said Professor Sinclairo, “belongs to a period which brought all thinking men face to face with many perplexities and problems. Like many of his contemporaries Tolstoy was much exercised by questions of belief. But it is charnctcric of him that his problems always took a practical rather than a theoretical form. ‘What must I do, and how ought T to live?’ these rather than ‘what must I believe?’ were the questions he had to answer before ho could find peace and inner harmony. His preoccupation with these questions runs through all his work. 110 was an egotist, but only in tho sense that he regarded his own problems as representative. His theory is that all art is a. revelation of tho artist’s inner life, and of himself he writes: ‘I have no secrets; verybody may know what I am doing.’ ” LITERARY FAME As a. man of letters, Tolstoy’s place was secured by the scries of fine novels which culminated in the two masterpieces “War And Peace” (perhaps the greatest of all novels) and “Anna Karenina.” All this work, on which Tolstoy’s purely literary fame rested, was practically finished before ho had reached the ago of fifty. The last thirty years of his life were given to social and religious propaganda which acquired for Tolstoy a second and perhaps wider, certainly a more debatable reputation. Tolstoyls social teaching was something that was worked out in his own experience. Born and educated in an aristocratic environment, ho had begun from early manhood to he dissatisfied with the life of his own class. He had moved in the literary circles of tho Russian capital; he had served with distinction in the Crimean War; ho had travelled in Western Europe as a student of social and political institutions; IkS had interested himself in the work of improving the lot of his own serfs. And he had reached middle life without any conviction of the meaning of life. That was a. matter in which science and philosophy threw no light. Turning from the learned to the unlearned, he was struck by the fact that the Russian peasantry seemed to possess just what their social superiors lacked—a satisfying conception of life and its duties.

CHANGED HIS LIFE Tolstoy concluded that tho answer to his problems was hidden from him because he lived an unnatural life of privilege and of exemption from manual labour. With characteristic courage and simplicity ho proceeded to divest himself of all class privileges and to set himself to live the life of the peasants. Such was Tolstoy’s intensely practical answer to his harrassing problem. He believed his own answer to he merely tho application, under modern conditions, of tho principles of Christ. The central Christian doctrine ho proclaimed to be that of non-resistance. If that were practised, many consequences would follow besides tho abolition of war. Then the practice of Christian Jove or charity would need a social order based on caste and privilege, and the exploitation of the weak-by the strong, and become tbo basis of an order based on equality and good will. That, with many corollaries and a strong admixture of asceticism, was the substance of Tolstoy's social gospel. The first step is tho renunciation of tho use of violence under the sanction of law and patriotism. TOUCH OF DIVINITY “If is easy to pick holes in this'teaching,” continued the speaker, “and to dismiss it airily as ‘impractical.’ But in doing so perhaps we ought to submit our own social ideals to the same scrutiny, and ask whether they have after all, been so brilliant a ‘practical’ success. If Tolstoy is an impossilitist, ■there is at least something heroic about him. Ho inis that touch of divine madness which belonged to St. Francis of Assisi. It is very necessary that our commonplace complacency should from time to time bo challenged by the spectacle of such wild and uncompromising courage and sincerity. The influence of Tolstoy’s personality cuts deeper than arguments and theories. Wc may reject him, hut wo are nover quite tho same after listening to him.” Professor Sinclairo was accorded a vole of thanks for his interesting address.