Saturday, December 5, 2009

Tolstoy's John Galt Speech

I completed Resurrection, which was the last full-length novel of Leo Tolstoy and the only one written after his spiritual crisis. The book's introduction includes these summary remarks:

Resurrection is the great imaginative synthesis of Tolstoyism, gravid with the fruits of a lifetime's agony. 'It is a kind of shrapnel shell of a novel,' declared one contemporary critic. 'The novel is but the containing case. The genius of the author is the explosive force, which scatters its doctrines like the closely packed bullets among the enemy' - the enemy on this occasion being the whole fabric of society, the Law Courts, the prison system and, in particular, the Church.

One certainly gets the sense that the main character, Nekhlyudov, is largely autobiographical. Tolstoy's strength is in his characterization and description, particularly how he can portray the regeneration of spirit in a man. Resurrection is similar to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in that it is fiction chasing after its author's ideals of life. However, beyond that there is little resemblance between the two: Atlas Shrugged is built around a terrific mystery and turn-paging plot, but with one-dimensional characters making pages of speeches at each other. On the other hand, the story and pacing of Resurrection is only slightly compelling, but the characters are rich and believable. In contrast to the epic 3-hour-long speech of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged (the only part of the book I skimmed through), Tolstoy's main character summarizes the author's driving point in under 2 pages. Here it is (taken from pages 449-451):

'This is what it comes to,' thought Nekhlyudov, 'these people accept as a law something which is not a law, and they do not acknowledge the eternal, immutable, pressing law that God Himself has written in man's heart. That is why I feel so depressed in their company,' thought Nekhlyudov. 'I am quite simply afraid of them. And indeed, they are terrible people - more terrible than brigands. A brigand might, after all, feel pity, but not these men: they are insured against pity as these stones are from vegetation. That is what makes them so terrible. They say Pugachev and Razin were terrible. These men are a thousand times worse. Suppose a problem in psychology were set to find means of making people of our time - Christians, humane, simple, kindly people - commit the most horrible crimes without having any feeling of guilt, only one solution would present itself: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen and so forth; which means, first that they must be convinced that there is a thing called government service which allows men to treat other men like inanimate objects, thereby banning all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this "government service" must be so conjoined that the responsibility for the results of their treatment of people can never fall on any one of them individually. Without these conditions it would be impossible in our times to commit such atrocious deeds as those I have seen today. The whole trouble is that people think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love, but no circumstances ever exist. Inanimate objects may be dealt with without love: we may fell trees, bake bricks, hammer iron without love. But human beings cannot be handled without love, any more than bees can be handled without care. That is the nature of bees. If you handle bees carelessly you will harm the bees and yourself as well. And so it is with people. And it cannot be otherwise, because mutual love is the fundamental law of human life. It is true that a man cannot force himself to love in the way he can force himself to work, but it does not follow from this that men may be treated without love, especially if something is required from them. If you feel no love - leave people alone,' thought Nekhlyudov, addressing himself. 'Occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men. Just as one can eat without harm and profitably only when one is hungry, so one can usefully and without injury deal with men only when one loves them. But once a man allows himself to treat men unlovingly, as I have treated my brother-in-law yesterday, and there are no limits to the cruelty and brutality he may inflict on others - as I saw this morning - and no limits to the suffering he may bring on himself, as the whole of my life proves. Yes, yes, it is so,' thought Nekhlyudov. 'It is true, it is right,' he repeated to himself again and again, enjoying the two-fold delight of refreshing coolness after the torturing heat and the assurance of having arrived at the clearest possible understanding of a problem that had occupied him for a long time.

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