Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

quite entangled me.⁠ ⁠… I used to help my people, and now see what a smart chap I have become!⁠ ⁠… Ah well, God is not without mercy; maybe I’ll manage somehow!”

He was evidently an intelligent, strong, active fellow, and only a series of misfortunes had brought him to his present condition.

Take another: his legs swathed in strips of rag; girdled with a rope; his clothing quite threadbare and full of small holes, evidently not torn, but worn-out to the last degree; his face, with its high cheekbones, pleasant, intelligent, and sober. I give him the customary five kopecks, and he thanks me and we start a conversation. He has been an administrative exile in Vyátka. It was bad enough there, but it is worse here. He is going to Ryazán, where he used to live. I ask him what he has been. “A newspaper man. I took the papers round.”

“For what were you exiled?”

“For selling forbidden literature.”

We began talking about the Revolution. I told him my opinion, that the evil was all in ourselves; and that such an enormous power as that of the Government cannot be destroyed by force. “Evil outside ourselves will only be destroyed when we have destroyed it within us,” said I.

“That is so, but not for a long time.”

“It depends on us.”

“I have read your book on revolution.”

“It is not mine, but I agree with it.”

“I wished to ask you for some of your books.”

“I should be very pleased.⁠ ⁠… Only I’m afraid they may get you into trouble. I’ll give you the most harmless.”

“Oh, I don’t care! I am no longer afraid of anything.⁠ ⁠… Prison is better for me than this! I am not afraid of prison.⁠ ⁠… I even long for it sometimes,” he said sadly.

“What a pity it is that so much strength is wasted uselessly!” said I. “How people like you destroy your own lives!⁠ ⁠… Well, and what do you mean to do now?”

“I?” he said, looking intently into my face.

At first, while we talked about past events and general topics, he had answered me boldly and cheerfully; but as soon as our conversation referred to himself personally and he noticed my sympathy, he turned away, hid his eyes with his sleeve, and I noticed that the back of his head was shaking.

And how many such people there are!

They are pitiable and pathetic, and they, too, stand on the threshold beyond which a state of despair begins that makes even a kindly man ready to go all lengths.

“Stable as our civilisation may seem to us,” says Henry George, “disintegrating forces are already developing within it. Not in deserts and forests, but in city slums and on the highways, the barbarians are being bred who will do for our civilisation what the Huns and Vandals did for the civilisation of former ages.”

Yes! What Henry George foretold some twenty years ago, is happening now before our eyes, and in Russia most glaringly⁠—thanks to the amazing blindness of our Government, which carefully undermines the foundations on which alone any and every social order stands or can stand.

We have the Vandals foretold by Henry George quite ready among us in Russia. And, strange as it may seem to say so, these Vandals, these doomed men, are specially dreadful here among our deeply religious population. These Vandals are specially dreadful here, because we have not the restraining principles of convention, propriety, and public opinion, that are so strongly developed among the European nations. We have either real, deep, religious feeling, or⁠—as in Sténka Rázin and Pougatchéf⁠—a total absence of any restraining principle: and, dreadful to say, this army of Sténkas and Pougatchéfs is growing greater and greater, thanks to the Pougatchéf-like conduct of our Government in these later days, with its horrors of police violence, insane banishments, imprisonments, exiles, fortresses, and daily executions.

Such actions release the Sténka Rázins from the last remnants of moral restraint. “If the learned gentlefolk act like that, God Himself permits us to do so,” say and think they.

I often receive letters from that class of men, chiefly exiles. They know I have written something about not resisting evil by violence, and for the greater part they retort ungrammatically, though with great fervour, that what the Government and the rich are doing to the poor, can and must be answered only in one way: “Revenge, revenge, revenge!”

Yes! The blindness of our Government is amazing. It does not and will not see that all it does to disarm its enemies merely increases their number and energy. Yes! These people are terrible, terrible for the Government and for the rich, and for those who live among the rich.

But besides the feeling of terror these people inspire, there is also another feeling, much more imperative than that of fear, and one we cannot help experiencing towards those who, by a series of accidents, have fallen into this terrible condition of vagrancy. That feeling is one of shame and sympathy.

And it is not fear, so much as shame and pity, that should oblige us, who are not in that condition, to respond in one way or other to this new and terrible phenomenon in Russian life.340

Second Day The Living and the Dying

As I sat at my work, Ilyá Vasílyevitch entered softly and, evidently reluctant to disturb me at my work, told me that some wayfarers and a woman had been waiting a long time to see me.

“Here,” I said, “please take this, and give it them.”

“The woman has come about some business.”

I told him to ask her to wait a while, and continued my work. By the time I came out, I had quite forgotten about her, till I saw a young peasant woman with a long, thin face, and clad very poorly and too lightly for the weather, appear from behind a corner of the house.

“What do you want? What is the matter?”

“I’ve come to see you, your Honour.”

“Yes⁠ ⁠… what about? What is the matter?”

“To see you, your Honour.”

“Well, what is it?”

“He’s