The Demands of Love

Let us imagine people—a man and a woman—husband, wife, brother, sister, father, daughter, mother, son—of the wealthy class, who have vividly understood the sins of a life of luxury and idleness amid the poverty and crushing toil of the common people, and have left the city, given away their surplus to someone or another, rid themselves of it one way or another, kept for themselves in investments, let us say, 150 rubles a year for two, or even kept nothing at all but earn this by some craft—let us say, painting on porcelain, translating good books—and live in the country, in the midst of a Russian village, having rented or bought an izba and with their own hands working their vegetable garden, their orchard, keeping bees, and at the same time offering the villagers whatever medical help they know how to give, and educational help—teaching children, writing letters, petitions, and so forth.

What could be better than such a life, it would seem? But this life will very soon cease to be joyful if these people do not practice hypocrisy and lying, if they are sincere. For if these people have renounced all the advantages and pleasures, the adornments of life that the city and money gave them, they did so only because they recognize people as brothers, equal before the Father—not equal in abilities or merits, if you will, but equal in their rights to life and to everything it can give them.

If doubt about the equality of people is possible when we consider them as adults with each person’s separate past, this doubt is no longer possible when we see children. Why should this child have all the care, all the help of knowledge for his physical and mental development, while that lovely child with the same and even better potential will become rachitic, degenerate, a semi-dwarf from lack of milk, and will remain illiterate, wild, bound by superstitions—only a coarse laboring force?

For if these people left the city and settled down to live as they live in the village, it is only because they believe in the brotherhood of people not in words but in deeds, and want if not to realize it then to be realizing it in their lives. And this very attempt at realization must, if only they are sincere, bring them to a terrible, hopeless position.

With their habits of order, comfort, and above all cleanliness acquired from childhood, they moved to the village and, having rented or bought an izba, cleaned it of insects, perhaps even wallpapered it themselves, brought in the remnants of furniture—not luxurious but necessary: an iron bed, a cupboard, a writing desk. And so they live. At first the people are shy of them: they expect, as from all the rich, a violent defense of their privileges, and therefore do not approach them with requests and demands. But gradually the disposition of the new inhabitants becomes clear: they themselves offer to serve without payment, and the boldest, most persistent people among the folk learn by experience that these new people do not refuse, and that one can profit by them.

And then begin declarations of all kinds of demands, which become more and more.

There begin not only entreaties but natural demands to share what one has in excess over others; and not only demands, but the people who have settled in the village themselves, always in close communion with the folk, feel the inevitable necessity to give their surplus where there is extreme need. But not only do they feel the necessity to give their surplus until they have left for themselves only what everyone should have, that is, what the average person has—there is no definition of this average, of what everyone should have—and they cannot stop, because there is always crying need around them, and they have a surplus compared to this need. It would seem one should keep a glass of milk for oneself; but Matrena has two children: an infant who cannot find milk in its mother’s breast, and a two-year-old who is beginning to waste away. It would seem one could keep a pillow and blanket in order to fall asleep in familiar conditions after a day of labor, but a sick man lies on a lousy coat and freezes at night, covered by a piece of sacking. It would seem one could keep tea and food, but they had to be given to wanderers, weakened and old. It would seem one could at least keep cleanliness in the house, but beggar boys came and were allowed to stay the night, and they brought in lice.

One cannot stop, and where should one stop?

Only those who do not know at all that feeling of consciousness of the brotherhood of men by virtue of which these people came to the village, or who have become so accustomed to lying that they no longer notice the difference between lies and truth, will say that there is a limit at which one can and should stop. The point is precisely that there is no such limit, that the feeling in the name of which this work is done is such that there is no limit to it, that if there is a limit then it means only that this feeling was not there at all, that there was only hypocrisy.

I continue imagining these people. They have worked all day, returned home; they no longer have a bed or a pillow; they sleep on straw that they obtained, and so, having eaten bread, they lie down to sleep; it is autumn, rain mixed with snow is falling. There is a knock at their door. Can they not open? A man enters, wet and feverish. What to do? Let him lie on dry straw? There is no more dry straw. And so one must either drive the sick man away, or lay him, wet, on the floor, or give up one’s own straw, and oneself, because one must sleep somewhere, lie down with him. But even this is not enough: a man comes whom you know to be a drunkard and a dissolute fellow, whom you have helped several times and who every time drank away what you gave him—he comes now with chattering jaws and asks you to give him three rubles, which he stole and drank away and for which, if he does not return them, he will be put in prison. You say that you have only four rubles and need them tomorrow for a payment. Then the visitor says: “Yes, this means it’s only talk, but when it comes down to it, you’re just like everyone else: let him perish whom we call brother in words, as long as we ourselves are safe.”

How should one act here? What should one do? To put the feverish sick man on the wet floor and lie down on the dry oneself—is even worse: you won’t fall asleep. To put him on your own bed and lie down with him: you’ll catch both lice and typhus. To give the beggar your last three rubles means to be left tomorrow without bread. Not to give means, as he says, to renounce that in the name of which you live. If one can stop here, then why not have stopped earlier? Why help people? Why give away one’s fortune, leave the city? Where is the limit? If there is a limit to the work you are doing, then the whole work has no meaning, or has only one terrible meaning—that of hypocrisy.

What then is to be done? What should one do? Not to stop means to ruin one’s life, to become lousy, to waste away, to die—and apparently without benefit. To stop means to renounce everything in the name of which what was done was done, in the name of which anything good was ever done. And one cannot renounce, because after all, it was not invented by me or by Christ that we are brothers and must serve one another; after all, this is so, and one cannot tear this consciousness from a person’s heart once it has entered him. What is to be done then? Is there no other way out?

And now let us imagine that these people, not frightened by the position into which they were put by the necessity of sacrifice leading to inevitable death, decided that their position results from the fact that the means with which they came to help the people were too small, and that this would not have happened, and they would have brought greater benefit, if they had a lot of money. Let us imagine that these people found sources of help, collected large, enormous sums of money, and began to help. And a week would not have passed before the same thing would have happened. Very soon all means, however great, would have flowed into those hollows which poverty has formed, and the situation would have remained the same.

But perhaps there is yet a third way out? And there are people who say that it exists and consists in promoting the enlightenment of people, and then this inequality will be destroyed.

But this way out is too obviously hypocritical; one cannot enlighten a population that at every moment finds itself on the edge of perishing from hunger. And above all, the insincerity of the people who preach this way out is evident from the fact that a person striving to establish equality, even through science, cannot support this inequality by his whole life.

But there is yet a fourth way out: to promote the destruction of the causes that produce inequality—to promote the destruction of the violence that produces it.

And this way out cannot fail to occur to those sincere people who will try in their lives to realize their consciousness of the brotherhood of men.

“If we cannot live here, among these people, in the village,” the people whom I am imagining will have to say, “if we are placed in such a terrible position that we must inevitably waste away, become lousy, and die a slow death, or renounce the only moral foundation of our lives, then this is because some are rich while others are destitute; and this inequality comes from violence; and therefore, since the foundation of everything is violence, we must fight against it.” Only the destruction of this violence and the slavery resulting from it can make possible such service to people in which there would be no inevitability of sacrificing one’s life.

But how to destroy this violence? Where is it? It is in the soldier, in the policeman, in the village elder, in the lock that fastens my door. How then am I to fight against this violence? Where, in what?

In the same way as people who live by violence fight, fighting violence with violence?

But for a sincere person this is impossible. To fight violence with violence means to substitute new violence for old violence. To help with enlightenment based on violence means to do the same thing. To collect money acquired by violence and use it to help people deprived by violence means to heal with violence the wounds produced by violence.

And even if one fights violence not with violence but with the preaching of nonviolence, with the exposure of violence, and above all with the example of nonviolence and sacrifice, still for a person living a Christian life amid a life of violence there is no other way out than sacrifice—and sacrifice to the end.

A person may not find in himself the strength to throw himself into this abyss, but a sincere person wishing to fulfill the law of God that he has recognized cannot fail to see his obligation. One may not go to this sacrifice, but if you want to follow the demands of love, then you must know and say this, consider yourself guilty if you have not given everything and your whole life, and not deceive yourself.

And is sacrifice to the end so terrible as it seems? For the bottom of need is not deep, and we often—like that boy who in terror hung by his hands all night in the well into which he had fallen, fearing an imaginary depth, when there was dry ground a foot and a half below him.

—Leo Tolstoy

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Translator’s Notes:

• This essay presents Tolstoy’s characteristic analysis of the impossible dilemma facing those who genuinely accept Christian ethics in a society structured by exploitation and violence. The logic is inexorable: if you truly believe in the brotherhood of all people, there is no principled place to stop giving—and yet giving to the point of self-destruction seems futile.
• The scenario of educated Russians settling in villages to live among and help the peasants reflects a real movement in late nineteenth-century Russia—the “going to the people” (khozhdenie v narod) of the populist intelligentsia in the 1870s, and later the Tolstoyan communes of the 1880s–1890s.
• Tolstoy’s conclusion—that the only real solution lies in destroying the violence that creates inequality, but that this destruction must itself be non-violent—represents the core of his anarcho-pacifist philosophy.
• The image of the boy hanging in fear over shallow water, used to suggest that complete self-sacrifice may be less terrible than imagined, is characteristic of Tolstoy’s use of homely parables to illuminate ethical points.
• The essay’s frank acknowledgment that one “may not find in himself the strength” to embrace complete sacrifice, while still insisting on the obligation to recognize it as such, reveals Tolstoy’s awareness of the gap between moral demand and human capacity—a recurring theme in his religious writings.