Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

bought the paper, supervised the printing, and negotiated with booksellers. She translated his On Life into French. She wrote letters to the press to defend his reputation and campaigned for an end to censorship of his works. She even visited the Tsar to plead successfully for permission to publish the Kreutzer Sonata, a novella she hated.

Tolstoy's relations with his children were little better. Though he had taken a strong interest in their education in early life, he was undemonstrative and distant, reluctant to touch or hug them. ⁵⁹ Tolstoy's elder sons were unsympathetic to their father's view of life. Stepan described his father in the late 1880s as generally calm but sad, usually silent but sarcastic when he did speak, and showing irritation with his wife. ⁶⁰ His third son, Leo, flirted briefly with his father's doctrines before deriding them. ⁶¹ His fourth son, Andrey, who claimed that in one twelve-month period his father spoke just two words to him (“go away”), joined the army as a volunteer in 1896, fought in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, and was a member of the Black Hundreds, a pro-Tsarist, anti-Semitic organization that carried out terrorist acts and pogroms. ⁶² His seventh son, Mikhail, had also volunteered for army service in the late 1890s. Only among his daughters did he win followers. Tanya and Masha adopted their father's vegetarianism, self-reliance, and work for the poor. Tolstoy acknowledged this, writing in 1889: “Of my children, only Masha is close to me in spirit. The others, poor things, are only oppressed by the fact that I am always around, reminding them of what their conscience demands of them.” ⁶³ As A. N. Wilson wryly observes, only Tolstoy, on noticing that even his own family found him exasperating, could so confidently attribute this to moral failings on their part. ⁶⁴ The shame and embarrassment of living a life of luxury in a manor haunted him to the end of his days, and he was acutely aware of how his message was greatly weakened by the life he led. He completed writing The Kingdom of God is Within You in April 1893 (publication was prohibited by the censor until 1906 but, copies nonetheless circulated throughout Russia), but this key work of his ethics did not bring him peace. In December of that year, he was wallowing in what Daniel Rancour-Laferriere sees as Tolstoy's primary psychological trait, moral masochism: “I feel oppressed, sick