Were they lasting, this peace and joy that he then boasted of possessing?
The hopes of the “great Revolution” of 1905 had vanished. The shadows had gathered more thickly; the expected light had never risen. To the upheavals of the revolutionaries exhaustion had succeeded. Nothing of the old injustice was altered, except that poverty had increased. Even in 1906 Tolstoy had lost a little of his confidence in the historic vocation of the Russian Slavs, and his obstinate faith sought abroad for other peoples whom he might invest with this mission. He thought of the “great and wise Chinese nation.” He believed “that the peoples of the Orient were called to recover that liberty which the peoples of the Occident had lost almost without chance of recovery”; and that China, at the head of the Asiatic peoples, would accomplish the transformation of humanity in the way of Tao, the eternal Law.[1]
A hope quickly destroyed: the China of Lao-Tse and Confucius was decrying its bygone wisdom, as Japan had already done in order to imitate Europe.[2] The persecuted Doukhobors had migrated to Canada, and there, to the scandal of Tolstoy, they immediately reverted to the property system.[3] The
- ↑ Letter to the Chinese, October, 1906. (Further Letters.)
- ↑ Tolstoy expressed a fear that this might happen in the above letter.
- ↑ “It was hardly worth while to refuse military and police service only to revert to property, which is maintained only by those two services. Those who enter the service and profit by property act better than those who refuse all service and enjoy property.” (Letter to the Doukhobors of Canada, 1899. Further Letters.)
