Henry George's Influence on
the Life and Work of Leo Tolstoy

Edward J. Dodson

[December 1999]

The following quotations and excerpts from Tolstoy's writings and other references suggest the extent to which Henry George influenced the ideas, writing and actions of Leo Tolstoy. Readers interested in a more comprehensive treatment of this subject are encouraged to obtain David Redfearn's book, Tolstoy, Principles for a New World Order, published in 1992 by Shepheard-Walwyn, London.

The most powerful description of how Leo Tolstoy's life changed becuase of his reading of Henry George's book, Progress and Poverty, and the subsequent corresponding relationship they developed is found in the volume Family Views of Tolstoy, published in 1926 by Houghton Millflin Company and edited by Aylmer Maude. Tolstoy's daughter, Tatiana, contributes a chapter titled "How My Father And I Dealt With The Land Question," an abridgement of which follows. Writes Tatiana Tolstoy:

"My father's love of the land and reverence for work on it were not only matters of principle, but were innate. ...He had always been in close contact with the peasants' work on the land, and often took personal part in it. When the break occurred, my father renounced possession of property either in money or in land. He wished to own nothing, and with characteristic ardour and passion strove with all his might to get rid of the burden that oppressed him.

"...then, in 1879, doubts began to torment him. What is the meaning of life? Was he living as he should do? Was he doing what he ought to for his own happiness and for that of others?

"...My father was completely absorbed by the interests his new outlook on life opened up to him. New people, quite strange to the family, began to interest him and to be interested in him.

"... It became specially irksome to him to be a landed proprietor -- and he invited the family to give away the whole of our property and live as peasants.

"At last my father definitely announced that he did not wish to be a proprietor, and he offered my mother the whole property. She refused to take it. Then my father devised another way: he proposed that the property should be dealt with as though he were dead. The heirs should, as in the case of his decease, divide it among them.

"So, it was arranged. In 1891, in Passion Week, all my brothers assembled at Yasnaya Polyana to effect the distribution. ...

"...I did not wish to take part in the distribution. It would at that time have been far easier for me to decline my inheritance than to accept it. But it is not in my nature to act under the impulse of the moment, and I decided first to consider my position and weigh my strength. ...


"And so I accepted my shre of the inheritance, 40,600 roubles and an estate of [about 216 acres] ... At first our coachman's son managed the property ..., but afterwards I sold off the stock and rented the land to the peasants of the nearest village.

"I remember the peasants bringing me payment for the first time. ...Three peasants came with the money. ...

"I felt so uncomfortable that I decided at any cost to alter the position. I settled down in solitude to consider the means of freeing myself from this burden. ...I had not consulted my father, as I wished first to consider the question and to weigh my strength with my own conscience alone.

"But I could not hide the mood I was in from my father's sensitive loving heart. He immediately felt that I was pre-occupied with something. This is what he wrote to my sister ... :

I have spoken with Tanya about [the land], and I greatly wish to arrange for her that the money for the land should go to the common use, a la Henry George.

"The heavy burden fell from y soul.

"The plough-land and the forest passed to the peasants. The homestead I retained for myself, chiefly in order to let Marya Alexandrovna Schmidt settle there, who was an old friend...."

"...In this agreement I placed the whole of the arable-land and meadow-land at the full disposal and use of the two peasant communes, so that they should have the right to plough, sow, and take the harvest of the arable-land and of the meadows, and to feed their cattle on the fields and meadows, and in the forests have the use every five years of the clearings and the felling of the dry wood. The peasants undertook to pay into a communal fund a rent of six roubles per desyatina, to manure the ground, to guard the wood, and to pay the taxes. The peasants bound themselves to use for communal needs the money received for rent, in accord with the decision of the meetings of the Communes of the two villages.

"Finally, I requested my heirs in case of my death, to hand over the land to the absolute ownership of the peasants. Although my father explained the land system of Henry George to me, I then felt but little interest in it. My sould was well satisfied, because I saw that my father was pleased and the peasants contented. Only some years later did I take to Henry George's books and study them conscientiously. When I had understood his system I was seized with such a wave of enthusiasm at the clear justice of his masterly teaching, that I wished to communicate what I had experienced to everyone else as quickly as possible.

"I am convinced that no sincere unprejudiced man can fail to succumb to the magic of the powerful logic displayed in Henry George's teaching, based -- as everything great is -- on a religious principle. the man developed his system not by detailed work in the study, but by his life as a common workman who had on one occasion been driven to ask a stranger in the streets for money, to buy medicine for his sick wife. He reached the truth by his personal sufferings, by the genius of his brain, and the nobility of his warm heart. In all that happens in life, that truth is proclaimed by Nature herself with all her unlimited resources, though till now people are afraid to trust to that holy solution of the land question at which Henry George arrived. Nevertheless, I do not doubt that humanity will some day open its eyes to this simple method of universal welfare, and that the riches of mankind will be so increased that there will no longer be, as now, people dying of hunger.

"Is it surprising that, reading the powerful words of the author of Progress and Poverty, another great soul, filled with the same love for truth and for men, on the opposite side of the globe, was moved and responded to the call?

"From the time my father read the books of Henry George he never omitted an opportunity of disseminating that teaching. Conversations often took place in my presence on this theme, and I listened to them with sympathy.

"One thing perplexed me. Although for the accomplishment of that system in life no rude seizure [Under Henry George's system a single tax is put on the land, as on something not produced by human toil. All other taxes are abolished. Anyone unable to pay the single tax on the land he has, must pass the land over to a common fund, from which it may be taken by anyone who can pay for it.] was necessary, of the kind that, like all violence, was repulsive to my father, yet the tax on land will have to be collected by the Government, and government is based on violence.

"I spoke of this to my father. He replied that that was what sometimes perturbed him, but that with the existing order it was, nevertheless, the best solution of the land question. My father imagined to himself a future social order in which the guidance of the people would be different from the present kind of government, and would be voluntary.


"Having ceased to interest myself in Henry George's system in its application to [my former landed estate], I began to concern myself with the theoretcial side of it with yet greater interest.

"At Yasnaya Polyana papers were received specially devoted to the propaganda of Henry Georgeism as well as many of his books, which at my father's instigation were translated into Russian. I read everything that came to hand on that subject.

"Having read all Henry George's books I began to read works by other authors relating to the same question, thinking that perhaps I should find in them something new or something that refuted his theory. Then I obtained and read criticisms of Henry George, thinking that there might be refutations that had not occurred to my father or to me; but on the land question I found nothing comparable to Henry George, and in the Russian criticisms of him I found only glaring ignorance of his works. Having read a pile of books I remained of the same opinon -- that I had found nothing simpler, clearer, more profitable, or more just, than Henry George's system.

"How I wished that the whole world would become acquainted with it! I did not doubt that to know it meant to accept it; but what could one do to direct people's eyes toward it?

"I decided to write a popular book expounding his teaching. It seemed to me that I should be able to do this. I knew by my own experience how difficult it is for one unacquainted with the science of political economy and undeveloped on that side, immediately to seize and assimilate the thought of the great American economic philosopher [English readers usually find Henry George very easy to read, but allowance must be made for the difficulty that would naturally be encountered by a Russian lady reading an American work on economics, either in English or in a Russian transaction, which latter might be by no means equally simple.]. Many technical terms are obscure to the uninitiated. Knowing how much I had had to read, to meditate, and to ask, before I clearly understood Henry George, I wished to express his views in popular language intelligible to any ordinary reader.

"Of course the best judge of this would have been my father, but I was hindered from submitting my work to his criticism by the knowledge that, receiving it from me, he woud not be able to judge of it freely and impartially. So I decided to send him the first part of the book anonymously.

"I typed out my manuscript on a Remington, and also typed a letter in which I asked L.N. Tolstoy to reply to me in Moscow to a given address. ...I awaited a reply with the greatest impatience, but it did not come. ...I grew impatient and excited, reproached everybody, and did not know what to do with myself.

"At last I decided to go to Yasnaya Polyana.

"I arrived in the morning, but as my father was busy I did not interrupt his work. I asked my sister, Sasha, what had been happening at Yasnaya, what visitors had come, and what leter had been received. She said that among other interesting letters papa had received a manuscript from a certain Polilov, with which he had been very pleased. She told me that he praised the article highly and had written Polilov a long letter, a kind of essay, which he had revised several times. She handed me the letter from the pseudo-Polilov enclosing my article. ...I read the following:

Your article, with your letter to me, has afforded me great pleasure. I have long ceased to interest myself -- and in fact I never interested myself -- in political questions; but the question of the land, that is of land slavery, though it is considered a political question, is, as you quite correctly say, a moral question, a question of the violation of the most elementary demands of morality, and therefore that question not only occupies my mind but torments me. I am tormented by the stupid cynical decision of that question accepted by our unfortunate Government, and by the complete misunderstanding of it by people who are considered advanced.


God help you to complete your work, and the sooner the better.

Do you know Nikolaev? [I was not only acquainted with S.D. Nikolaev, but had received from him much help both in advice and in books. He placed at my disposal his whole library on the land question, and from it I had drawn much of my information.] Get to know him. He is such a connoisseur of Henry George, such a passionate partisan of his teaching, and such an admirable man, as one seldom meets.


...our Government class, standing as usual on the lowest moral and intellectual stage, at the present time having become particularly self-confident and bold, particularly after their triumph over the revolution (1905-6), and being unable to think independently or to understand the immorality of landed property, are recklessly breaking up the age-long supports of Russian life, in order to bring the Russian people to that horrible immoral and ruinous condition in which the peoples of Europe are. These people in their limitations and immorality do not understand that the Russian people are not now in a position in which it would be natural to compel them to imitate Europe and America, but in one in which they should show other nations the path along which the emancipation of people from land slavery can be accomplished.

At all my encounters with members of the Duma I have considered it my duty to beg them at least to raise in this Duma the question of the emancipation of the land from the claims of private property and to introduce a land-tax in the manner of Henry George. Their reply is always one and the same: "We have not occupied ourselves with that question and are not acquainted with it. Above all, that matter would in no case be accepted for discussion.


So how can I help rejoicing at your activity? Please write me of the success of your work.

"Very complex and mixed feelings arose in me on reading that letter. I was in ecstasy at my father's approval.

"But at the same time I had a feeling of shame and repentance at the mystification I had practised. I only now realized that on learning who the real author was, my father would be grieved and disappointed that it was not from a new hearth that he knowledge and propaganda of Henry George's idea had arisen, but that it had come form one of his own flesh and blood.

"Then I told him all about it. What I had thought, and why I sent him the article under a pseudonym.

"He did not reproach me, but I felt I had guessed right when I feared he would be disappointed. He did not show it, but between people so near to one another as we were no shadow can pass unnoticed.

"My father, as usual, did not give me any advice, but at the end of our talk he laughed and said: 'But where is Polilov? I imagined him to myself so clearly. Neat, and dressed in a dark blue pea-jacket.'

"Then he added, patting me on the head: 'Well, if you don't finish that book you will be a real woman.'

"Alas! I was not false to my sex. I have remained a real woman, and my manuscript remains till to-day unfinished.!

TOLSTOY'S DIARY ENTRIES

Tolstoy kept a diary, recording his activities and thoughts on a fairly regular basis. He mentions Henry George and the land question just eleven times beginning in 1895 (and twice before this time). On May 18, 1895 he made this entry concerning his work on the novel Resurrection:

Didn't write during the day, and then wrote in the evening agian, and quite a lot, so that more than half has been sketched out. It's turning out in a strange way; Nekhlyudov must be a follower of Henry George and must bring this in, ...

Continuing with a record of his progress on Resurrection, on June 6 he writes:

... I'm writing about sins, and the whole work is clear to me right to the end.Finished reading Spir. Splendid. Three methods for the economic progress of mankind: the abolition of the ownership of land according to Henry George; a tax on inheritance, which would hand over accumulated wealth to society, if not in the first generation, then in the second; and a similar tax on wealth, on an excess of income over 1,000 roubles a family, or 200 roubles a person.

I was somewhat surprised that Tolstoy made no mention of the death of Henry George in 1897.

On March 21, 1898, Tolstoy makes an entry not relating to Henry George or land but on the futility of socialism and the necessity of Christianity:

The socialists will never destroy poverty and injustice, and the inequality of talents. The most intelligent and the strongest will always make use of the most stupid and the weakest. Justice and the equality of goods can never be attained by anything less than Christianity, i.e., by renouncing the self and recognizing the meaning of one's life to be in the service of others.

Tolstoy was still working on Resurrection as the year 1899 began. On January 2 he writes:

I'm at peace, as old men are. That's all. There are quite a lot of notes to write out. I'll write them out on the pages I left blank. Recently my interest in Resurrection seems to have waned, and I rejoice to feel other, more important interests -- the understanding of life and death. Much seems clear.

By mid-December his writing had come to an end. His entry of December 18 reads:

Finished Resurrection. It's not good. Not revised. Too hurried. But I'm free of it, and it doesn't interest me any more.

Some years ago I found a copy of Resurrection in a used book store and sat down to read it, marking off those sections that related to Henry George and the land question. I admit that I cannot remember the details of the plot, but one of the central themes is that the moral sense of right and wrong we are born with is strengthened and weakened, simultaneously, by our nurturing in our family, community and society. Tolstoy's main character, Nehludof, as a young university student discovers, absorbs and accepts the ideas of Henry George. He then enters the military and succumbs to the conventional wisdoms of this world. What follows are excerpts from the passages that relate directly to his intellectual and emotional struggle with Georgism. Chapter III Nehludof was just about to open his letters ... The next letter was from his steward. The steward wrote to say that a visit to his estates was necessary, in order to enter into possession and laso to decide about the further management of his land: whether it was to be continued in the same way as when his mother was alive, or whether, as he had represented ..., he had not better increase his stock, and himself farm all the land now rented by the peasants. the steward wrote that this would be a far more profitable way of managing the property; ...This letter was partly disagreeable and partly pleasant. It was pleasant to feel that he had power over so large a property, and yet disagreeable, because Nehludof had been an enthusiastic admirer of Herbert Spencer. Being himself heir to a large property, he was specially struck by the position taken up by Spencer in Social Statics, that justice forbids private land-holding, and, with the straightforward resoluteness of his age, he had not merely spoken to prove that land could not be looked upon as private property, and written essays on that subject at the university, but had acted up to his convictions: considering it wrong to hold landed property, he had given to the peasants the 500 acres he had inherited from his father. Inheriting his mother's large estates and thus becoming a landed proprietor, he had to choose one of two things: either to give up his property as he had given up his father's land some ten years before, or silently to confess that his former ideas were mistaken and false. He could not choose the former because he had no means but the landed estates (he did not care to serve in a government position); moreover, he had formed luxurious habits which he could not easily give up. Besides, he had no longer the same inducements; his strong convictions, the resoluteness of youth, and the ambitious desire to do something unusual were gone. As to the second course, that of denying those clear and unanswerable proofs of the injustice of land-holding which he had drawn from Spencer's Social Statics, a brilliant corroboration of which he had at a later period found in the works of Henry George -- such a course was impossible to him. And this was why the steward's letter was unpleasant to him.[pp.12-15] Chapter XII When Nehludof first saw Katusha he was a student in his third year at the university, and ws preparing an essay on land tenure during the summer vacation, which he passed with his aunts. ... During that summer ... Nehludof passed through that blissful state of his existence when a young man for the first time himself, without guidance from any one outside, realises all the beauty and significance of life and the importance of the task allotted in it to man, and, grasping the possibility of unlimited advance towards perfection for one's self and for all the world, ives himself to his task, not only hopefully, but with full conviction of attaining to the perfection he imagines. In that year, while still at the university, he had read Spencer's Social Statics, and Spencer's views on land- holding especially imprressed him, he himself being heir to large estates. His father had not been rich, but his mother had received ten thousand acres of land for her dowry. At that time he fully realised all the cruelty and injustice of private property in land, and being one of those to whom a sacrifice to the demands of conscience gives the highest spiritual enjoyment, he decided that he would not retain property rights, but would let the peasant labourers have the land he had inherited from his father. It was on this land question he was writing his essay.[p.46] Chapter XIII After that Nehludof did not see Katusha for more than tow years. When he saw her again he had just been promoted to the rank of officer and was going to join his regiment. ...He had then been an honest, unselfish lad, ready to sacrifice himself for any good cause; now he was a depraved, refined, egotist, caring only for his own enjoyment. ...Then money was not needed, for he did not require even one-third of what his mother allowed him, and it was possible to refuse the property inherited from his father and give it to the peasants. But now his allowance ... did not suffice, and he had already had some unpleasant talks about it with his mother. And all this terrible change had come about because he had ceased to believe himself and had taken to believing others. This he had done because it was too difficult to live believing one's self: believing one's self, one had to decide every question, not in favour of one's animal I, which is always seeking for easy gratification, but in almost every case against it. ...In the same way, when Nehludof came of age and, because he considered the holding of private property in land wrong, gave to the peasants the small estate inheritged from his father, this step filled his mother and family with dismay, and served all his relatives as an excuse for making fun of him. He was continually told that these peasants were no richer after having received the land, but, on the contrary, poorer, having opened three pubic-houses and left off doing any work.[pp.51-52] Book II / Chapter I Neludof had lived on that estate in his childhood and youth, and had been there twice since; and once, at his mother's request, he he had taken a German steward there, and had verified the accounts with him. The state of things there, and the peasants' relations to the management (that is, to the proprietor), had therefore long been known to him. The relations of the peasants to the proprietor were those of utter dependence on his management. Nehludof knew all this when, as a university student, he had confessed and preached Henry Georgism and, on the basis of that teaching, had given to the peasants the land inherited from his father.[p.225] Chapter VI It was quite evident that all the misery of the people, or at least the greatest and directest cause of it, lay in the fact that the land which should feed them was not in their hands, but in the hands of those who, profiting by the ownership of the land, live by the work of these people. The land, so needful to men that they die when deprived of it, was tilled by these people on the verge of starvation, to the end that the corn might be sold abroad and the owners of the land might buy themselves hats and canes, and carriages and bronzes, etc. Nehludof now understood this as clearly as he understood that horses when they have eaten all the grass in the enclosure whre they are kept, must of necessity grow thin and starve unless they are put where they can get food off other land. This was terrible, and must not go on. Means must be found to alter it, or at least not to take part in it. ...In scientific circles, Government institutions, and in the papers, we talk about the causes of poverty among the people and the means of ameliorating their condition; but we do not talk of the only sure means which would certainly lighten their condition, namely, giving back to them the land they need so much. Henry George's fundamental position recurred vividly to Nehludof's mind. He remembered how he had once been carried away by it, and he was surprised that he could have fortotten it. "the earth cannot be any one's proerty; it cannot be bought or sold any more than water, air, or sunshine. All have an equal right to the advantages it gives to men." ...[pp.248-249] Chapter IX "...There is an American, Henry George; this is what he has thought out, and I agree with him. ..." "Why, you are the master, and you can give it away as you like. What is to hinder you? The power is yours," said the cross old man. This confused Nehludof, but he was pleased to see that not he alone was dissatisfied with the interruption. Nehludof was encouraged by this, and began to explain Henry George's single-tax system. "The earth is no man's; it is God's," he began. "The land is common to all. all have the same right to it. But thre is good land and bad land, and every one would like to take the good land. How is one to do in order to get it justly divided? In this way: he who uses the good land must pay the value of it to those who have got none," Nehludof went on, answering his own question. "As it would be difficult to sya who should pay to whom, and as mney is needed for communal use, it should be arranged that he who uses the good land should pay the value of that land to the commune for its needs. Then every one would share equally. If you want to use land, pay for it -- more for the good land, less for the bad land. If you do not wish to use land, don't pay anything, and those who use the land will pay the taxes and the communal expenses for you."[p.262].

Tolstoy was now engrossed in the writing of The Slavery of our Times, finished in August of 1900, which was published that year in the United States by Dodd, Mead & Company.

The third chapter of this essay begins with a challenge to the integrity of those who had founded the science of political economy, "which declared that it had discovered the laws which regulate division of labor and of the distribution of the products of labor among men." The consequence of their work, Tolstoy suggests, is that "according to the guidance of science, people belonging to the class of robbers, theives or receivers of stolen goods may quietly continue to utilise the things obtained by thefts and robbery," and "that the existing order of things is what it ought to be." Finally, in chapter eight, Tolstoy offers readers a glimpse into the means of ending slavery: We can imagine that the land may be freed from the claims of private proprietors by Henry George's plan, and that, therefore, the first cause driving people into slavery -- the lack of land -- may be done away with. With reference to taxes (besides the single-tax plan) we may imagine the abolition of taxes, or that they should be transferred from the poor to the rich, ...

Not until 1905 does Tolstoy once again mention George, prompted by his reading of a collection of George's speeches and aritcles edited by S.D. Nikolayev and published in The Intermediary. On April 16, he writes:

...I very much want to write an exposition of my belief and also something about Henry George, whom I read in Nikolayev's edition and was delighted by once more.

On April 2 of the following year, 1906, Tolstoy collected his thoughts and recorded "the revelations of life." Last in a list of 18 items, he included this:

People talk and argue about Henry George's system. It isn't the system which is valuable (although not only do I not know a better one, but I can't imagine one), but what is valuable is the fact that the system establishes an attitude to land which is universal and the same for everybody. Let them find a better one if they can.

In June he had written to a correspondent named Y.D. Belyayev, of New Times, regarding George's proposals and noted:

A correspondent has been, and I wrote down a few things about Henry George and told him about the Duma and the repressions.

On June 2 of 1909 Tolstoy received a telegram from Henry George Jr., who had recently arrived in Russia and asked to visit Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy readily agreed and they met on June 5. Of the meeting, Tolstoy wrote simply:

George's son came with a photographer. A pleasant person.

Later that year he recorded that he had had a dream about George. Then, on November 7 he made he final entry mentioning George:

Yesterday morning I received a wonderful letter from Polilov about Henry George and replied to him, ...

Polilov, as detailed above, was Tolstoy's daughter.


In the rather brief time spend to research and write this essay I have not stumbled across any other reference to Tatiana's manuscript. Of some interest is what happened to the manuscript, as well as what role, if any, she played in supporting the spread of Henry George's message to the Russian people. David Redfearn adds nothing more to what Tatiana records. Perhaps a reader of this modest summary who is more familiar with Tolstoy's influence and that of his close associates (at least up to the point of the Bolshevik takeover) might add some of the history.

SOURCES:

The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi (Patriotism, Slavery of Our Times, General Articles). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1928.

Resurrection. Originally published 1899 by Dodd, Mead & Company.

Tolstoy's Diaries, Vol. II 1895-1910, edited by R.F. Christian. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985.