Alston, Charlotte The History of a Radical International Movement: Tolstoy and his Disciples (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 516 close readings and generalizations that merit the attention of anyone seriously concerned with Russian poetry. New College, Oxford G. S. Smith Alston, Charlotte. The History of a Radical International Movement: Tolstoy and his Disciples. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2014. x + 309 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £59.50. Starting in the mid 1880s, enthusiasm for Russian culture swept Europe, and subsequentlyspreadtosuchplacesasSouthAfrica,India,ChinaandtheMiddle East.LevTolstoiwaspartofthiswave,inhiscaseasmuchasapublicintellectual as a writer of fiction. The History of a Radical International Movement: Tolstoy and his Disciples tells the story of his relation to and influence on contemporary social reform movements. It focuses on the Anglo-American arena, but also discusses activists and movements in the Netherlands, Hungary, the AustroHungarian Empire and elsewhere. This storyline develops naturally, because the book tells how different centres of Tolstoi activity and individuals who considered themselves Tolstoyans interacted. While there are many individual studies about Tolstoyism, Charlotte Alston is the first to provide an overview of it. To do so, in addition to accessing previous scholarship, she has worked in archives in many countries. This transnational approach weaves many threads of the subject together for the first time. Alston provides many case histories of individuals inspired by Tolstoi through such works as A Confession (1879), What I Believe (1884), What Then Must We Do? (1886), On Life (1887) and The Kingdom of God is Within Us (1893). These included lawyers; businessmen, clerks and professionals; activists, socialists and anarchists; and conscientious objectors, many associated with the military. They came from many countries and backgrounds and reacted to their conversions in different ways. For all of them, however, it was an awakening or intensification of conscience that inspired, even demanded action. Many of them rejected their previous lives, and Tolstoi would have approved of this. Personally I find Tolstoi’s non-fictional tracts compelling but extreme. Many ofTolstoi’scontemporariesreactedsimilarlytothem:whileadmiringthepurity of his ideals, they considered them unrealistic. Tolstoi was a Christian anarchist who believed that life could be reformed and changed only one individual at a time. ‘To be a Tolstoyan meant to apply the principles of brotherhood, non-violence and non-resistance in all aspects of life, and to follow one’s own conscience at the expense of Church and state’ (p. 197). But what should one do REVIEWS 517 beyond expressing one’s ideals in one’s personal behaviour? Tolstoi opposed all political action. This meant that Tolstoyans could not engage in social reform through government or the courts, the legitimacy of both of which he rejected. Tolstoi’s beliefs made more sense in Russia, an authoritarian state whose ruler was above the law, and whose subjects sought moral freedom outside of politics, than in England and America, where citizens enjoyed political freedom. Left on their own, devoted Tolstoyans put their conscience to work in the service of many causes. Some became radicals and revolutionaries. True to his principles, Tolstoi did not actively participate in organizing Tolstoyan societies or communities. Devoted followers did this for him, however. Chief among these was Vladimir Chertkov. Alston offers the most unbiased account of Chertkov that I know — neglecting neither his faults nor his virtues. She also traces the history of such Tolstoyan establishments as the Christian Commonwealth in the US, the Purleigh Colony in Britain and the Vrede group in the Netherlands. She discusses Tolstoi societies, publishing enterprises such as the Intermediary Press in Russia and the Free Age Press in Britain, and the Tolstoyan periodical press. Tolstoi advocated a form of Christianity that emphasized ethics above all else, and that ‘would not ask him to suspend rational thought’ (p. 15). Like many Victorians, he sought to reconcile science with religion, even if he privileged the latter. For him conscience was the conduit to the sacred; this belief appealed both to various Russian sectarians with whom he was close, and to the modern mentality, whether religious or secular, that favours individualism. He was a kind of transcendentalist, for whom self-reliance became a mantra. He relied on intuition for moral guidance, but practiced a kind of Kantianism according to which morality was the product of a higher reason inaccessible except through that intuition...